Forever

83.

Cormac waits for the dark young lady on an evening of steady rain. Not just rain, but an unruly New York rain, pushed by river winds. He is in the backyard of a restaurant called East of Eighth, on Twenty-third Street, next to a movie multiplex. It’s a few minutes after seven on an evening in March. A huge Cinzano umbrella spreads above the table, but the wet breeze toys with it, lifting it along an edge, filling it like a parachute, then dropping it, spraying him with rain. A young bright-blond waiter comes over, shielding his hair with a large menu, and says that he can move Cormac inside to the upstairs room. Cormac smiles and shakes his head.

“I like the rain,” he says. “And I’m meeting someone here.”

“Suit yourself,” the waiter says in an irritated way, and goes back to his place inside the back door that opens to this garden. Cormac does like the rain. Across all the years, it has felt like a gift, a cleansing refreshment of air and skin. And it always puts him, if only for a few seconds, in Ireland long ago. The New York rain is drumming now on the umbrellas of the empty tables the way it long ago drummed upon the roof of a blacksmith’s forge. The way it hammered then on the snug slate roof of the vanished old house. His first house in the world. His truest home. Now, in this fleeting present tense, he watches the rain racing down the brick walls of the adjoining buildings, making a million little glistening rivers. Rain released by the March sky. Falling upon this street where once he lived many days and nights, long ago, in a world now vanished.

The wall he now faces is the wall of an office building. The wall behind him rumbles with explosions from a movie being shown in the multiplex. Images of other Twenty-third Street theaters race through him, quick as rain. The tail end of the nineteenth century, the years after Tweed died, and New York changed again as everything moved uptown. Gaslight and fog. Streetcars and horses. Golden footlights. An orchestra leader in a tux with his back to the audience. The odor of forgotten perfumes. Women in the lobbies of hotels. Rouged faces. Eyes defined by kohl. And there: a wife, now long dead, laughing when she sees him enter the foyer. Betrayal in her laugh. He tries to remember her full name. Catherine something Underwood. The middle name will not come. The rain drums on the umbrella. A fire engine screams through the evening.

When Tweed died, time flowed on, of course, and so did life. Slicker bandits arrived in New York, with even greater appetites than anyone in the Ring. The pigs were gone from the street. Another kind of swine took over the elegant Victorian sties. Electricity killed the darkness of midnight and drove elevators into the high floors of new buildings. Great armies of immigrants arrived at Castle Garden, speaking Yiddish and Sicilian and the English of Ireland. They were coming to the New Jerusalem, and the population soared to more than a million. Tenements rose to house them, while the Brooklyn Bridge soared majestically over the East River. Sailing ships became more and more rare as steam power brought liners to the new piers along the North River.

Cormac fought brain sludge writing dozens of preposterous novels for Beadle & Adams and the other fiction factories, into which he sneaked sympathies for unions, and the poor, and the despised Irish, along with his astonished love for the city itself. He did not exactly think of himself as an American, but he was definitely a New Yorker. That meant that he embraced the city’s culture of work, even though the bounty of Bill Tweed had freed him from the need to earn money to eat. He wrote one dime novel in three days, a nine-part serial in two weeks. To flush his brain, he wrote another entirely in German, and then did it all over again in English. He moved from one newspaper to another, the rhythm of his life falling into a year of work, a year of disappearance. In New York, nobody expected constancy anymore. On newspapers, he welcomed the anonymity of the copy desk, where he corrected the style and grammar of younger men, but he was still thrilled by the chance to go out to the streets as a reporter. He saw the arrival of Pulitzer from St. Louis and worked for him at The World in three different years under three different names, without ever meeting him. He saw the arrival of Hearst too, young and brash and full of the romantic excitements driven into him by the West, convinced that the coming century would belong to him. While Hearst and Pulitzer fought it out along Park Row, the halftone changed the look of newspapers, allowing reproduction of photographs on high-speed presses, and the old pen-and-ink sketch artists were soon gone, to make illustrations for magazines or to draw comic strips or to create paintings that evoked the streets where they had worked for newspapers, instead of some lost European Arcadia full of nymphs and princes. Some of them lived here on Twenty-third Street, others drifted to the small houses west of Greenwich Village.

The subjects of Cormac’s scrutiny as a reporter had not changed from the early years of the century: the usual murders, the usual suicides, the usual robberies, the usual schemes for instant wealth. Only the details were different. There were big stories too, from the astonishing beauty of the Blizzard of 1888, when the Battery was turned into a blinding white pasture and the only sound for three days was the rasping of shovels, to the horrors that followed the Panic of 1893 (brokers diving from windows, children found starved in tenements, undertakers working triple time), and, as the century wound down, the jingo fever of the Spanish-American War.

All of this was impersonal, which was the way Cormac wanted it. But in the years after Tweed died, he began to see stories in the newspapers that entered him like knife thrusts. They were all small: social notes, really, in diaries from London, and in the society gossip that flowed from Gramercy Park and Madison Square. They were not the stuff of page-one headlines. But there was a story of a woman at a party in London, and a young man who appeared at an opera opening in Paris. Another was found dead in Australia of heart failure. A fourth was living out West, beyond the Rockies, operating a mine. All were Warrens. All traced their descent to the Earl of Warren. He could not leave Manhattan to pursue them, but he feared their arrival on his granite island.

“Please don’t come to New York,” he said out loud one night in his studio in Duane Street. “Please don’t come here….”

One of them did, Michael Warren, a handsome young fellow (the newspapers said), with a reddish tinge to his dark brown hair, tall, broad-shouldered, witty. He was on his way to London and was staying with friends in Gramercy Park. Cormac read these stories with a weary sense of responsibility. The Warrens were appearing in his life now like the terms of an old curse. From the distant past, he heard Mary Morrigan repeat the rules of the tribe. He remembered the way his father had died. He heard his father speaking: “In our tribe, the murderer must be pursued to the ends of the earth. And his male children too. They must be brought to the end of the line….”

And then Cormac was relieved. One newspaper explained that this Michael Warren was leaving for London on the morning Cormac read the newspapers. That is, he was already gone. There was no need to travel to Gramercy Park, to stand in leafy shadows, to observe, to plan an ambush. No need to replace the lost sword with another weapon. It was a kind of reprieve. But he knew it was not permanent. For certain Americans, all roads led to New York.

Meanwhile, he could only try to live his life. He told himself that change was everything, that it was essential to any life, long or short. One year, he drew and painted with his left hand only, which took the slickness out of his drawing and even made him stand and sit in new ways. In another year, he learned to sign, so that he could speak to deaf-mutes, and wrote an article about them for the Century. He bought a camera too, which used 4 × 5 glass plates, and wandered the streets photographing buildings, later pasting them together along one wall of the top-floor studio. He thought of this as a way of seeing more deeply what he had known too familiarly. When he had photographed every house on three blocks, he stopped using the camera and buried himself in the Hall of Records, examining documents and deeds for each building, writing the information on small cards that served as captions for the photographs. His brain sparkled.

Across those years, he had love affairs. He made cautious friendships. He helped bury Cahill in 1894 and a year later did the same for Edelstein. He read many books and listened to much music. He walked each year to the river on his birthday and dropped a flower in the flowing waters, hoping it would sail to Ireland. He sometimes longed for the Countess de Chardon. About once a week, he’d remember Bill Tweed and his marvelous laugh.

Now, as the March rain falls on Twenty-third Street, he rises up again from the past.

“Hello,” a voice says.

He looks up, and she is standing above him, Delfina Cintron. Smiling, her teeth very white in her dark face. She is wearing a wet tan trench coat, the collar up, and her hair is a wild mass of sprouting black curls. She carries no umbrella, for the day had begun with sun. Cormac rises, takes her elbow in greeting.

“We can go inside,” he says. “They have a table upstairs.”

She glances around the yard, with its empty tables and steady drumming of raindrops, and a look of satisfaction crosses her face. It’s as if she accepted the feeling of an intimate fortress, walling off the world.

“This is fine,” she says. “I like the rain.”

He uses a white cloth napkin to wipe a puddle off a chair, and she sits down.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she says. She pronounces the word “sawry.” The long soft vowel of the Caribbean.

“You’re not all that late,” Cormac says. She glances at her watch, with its red plastic wristband.

“Nine minutes,” she says and smiles again. “People used to say Latinos were always late, so I made a big deal out of being on time. My friends called me En Punto Cintron. On-the-dot Cintron. But at the store, the customers never leave on time, so we can’t leave either.”

“Inconsiderate swine,” Cormac says, and they both laugh in a way that is not quite comfortable. Cormac thinks: I don’t know how to do this anymore. I don’t know what to say or how to begin. I don’t know the music or the movies or the slang. Every woman in the world is too young for me. The Queen Mother of England, aged one hundred, is too young for me. This girl: She’s an undiscovered country. And beautiful too.

Delfina Cintron wears no makeup, but her dark ochre skin is reddish with youth. Cinnamon skin. Redolent of Africa and the sun of the Caribbean. An airplane passes overhead, flying very low.

“That guy must be trying to land on Ninety-sixth Street,” she says.

“Or Central Park.”

“If we hear a boom, he missed something.”

The sound of engines roars away into nothing, and they hear only the rain drumming on umbrellas. The waiter arrives, now protecting his yellow hair with a fuchsia umbrella bearing the name of the restaurant. He hands them two menus. He is gym thin, his hair combed into quills. Delfina smiles at him in an amused way.

“Something to drink?” he says. Cormac turns to her. “Delfina? A drink?”

She nibbles the inside of her full lower lip. Actually choosing.

The pause of someone who does not drink.

“A rum an’ tonic,” she says. Her voice is hoarse and furry. “Pellegrino for me,” Cormac says.

The waiter nods and goes away.

The curls of her hair are tiny and fine and very black. For the first time in years, he wants to plunge his hands through hair until he can feel the curved bone of a female skull. Delfina reads the menu as if it were a sacred text. Delfina Cintron. Her body hidden under the raincoat the way her skull is hidden under her exploding hair.

And Cormac remembers seeing her for the first time, walking on Fourteenth Street, on a day thick with August. Last year. Last summer. The year of Our Lord 2000, when all the predictions about the millennium came up empty on the first day of the year. There was no universal computer crash. There were no arrivals of long-dead gods. He had never felt more tired, more thickened by sludge. A sludge made of boring televised repetitions. A sludge of journalistic alarums and diversions that turned out to be nothing. A sludge dominated, day after day, by the tyrannies of clocks and calendars.

And here she came: wearing low-cut jeans and a black halter with part of her smooth brown belly showing. Then he glanced up at her face. She wore her face that day like a mask of defiance. The makeup severe. The eyes dead. The combination of smooth flesh and hardened eyes saying: Go ahead and try, pendejo.

“How is the food here?”

“Okay,” Cormac says. “But don’t try anything fancy.” “Maybe pasta, no?”

“Sí.”

“Tu español está mejorando, Señor O’Connor.”

“Ojalá, Señorita Cintron.”

Remembering how he had stopped that August day as she went by. Stunned. Short of breath. His heart pounding. Fourteenth Street jammed with shoppers and junkies, cops and schoolboys, telephone repairmen, cable installers, women with kids in strollers, delivery boys, homeless men in winter coats. Her hair bobbing as she cut a path through the crowd. Then there was a surge of pedestrians, and he lost her. Cursing himself for a goddamned fool. Cursing his slowness, his caution. Looking and looking and looking, then cursing the gods for playing with him. He came again to Fourteenth Street, at the same time, the same corner, arrived day after day for three weeks: hoping to see her in the crowd. To approach her. To try to know if this dark lady was the dark lady, sketched for him long ago in a cave in Inwood. And then thought: Perhaps she was an illusion, a specter created by August heat, by lack of water, or by my own need. She might have been just another ghost in the haunted city.

In September he saw her again at last, coming out of the New School on Fifth Avenue, cutting across Fourteenth Street to the north side of the street, then moving west. He followed her like a detective on the trail of a murder suspect, watching the bobbing hair, the rhythmic walk, the long tawny legs (for this time she wore a skirt and blouse), while car horns blared at a double-parked sanitation truck and an ambulance screamed for passage. She hurried into a drugstore, pushing the door sharply before her. A Rite Aid. On the corner. She vanished through that front door. And didn’t come out.

“So I’ll have the fettucine,” she says, as the rain pounds down. “And a green salad.”

The waiter returns with a small green pad, exposed to the rain. Cormac orders the pasta and salad for Delfina and a medium burger for himself. The waiter is irritated in a thin, blond way. Imagine: reduced to this. Serving philistine food to philistines. He hurries off.

“Poor baby,” Delfina says as the waiter vanishes.

“Life is hard.”

“Claro que sí,” says Delfina Cintron, her voice almost a whisper.

And Cormac sees himself staring at the front door of Rite Aid that day, wondering why she has not emerged. Ten minutes went by. Twenty minutes. And then he entered the drugstore in search of her. He glanced down each aisle, as if searching for shampoo or pretzels or mouthwash. She was not there. He saw a fat woman pushing a fat child in a stroller. A grizzled homeless guy was spraying Mitchum deodorant on his neck and wrists. A middle-aged man examined the label on a bottle of Advil.

He looked toward the front door, and there she was, behind the counter at the cash register. Her brow furrowed as she punched computer keys to ring up a sale. She was wearing a green smock over her street clothes. He drifted closer, paused before candies and chewing gums, and saw her name tag. Delfina. The dolphin. A line of customers waited their turn for her attention. Cormac left, knowing he would return. In search of the dolphin.

Now she is here before him, under the Cinzano umbrella, in a public place as private as a cave without a ceiling. The wind briefly rises. There’s a spray of rain. They hunch forward to avoid the raindrops, closer than they have yet been. He can smell her hair. Soap and rain. And look upon her unmarked skin. Skin of Arabs and Andalusians, Tainos and Africans. Shiny with dampness and rain. He gazes at her. Thick black eyebrows. Eyes set widely, lined only with her own black eyelashes, not mascara. In Spanish, it would be two words: mas cara. More face. Another face. Like that Mexican wrestler on channel 47: Mil Mascaras. A thousand faces. And beneath the brows, set in their black rims, are eyes so black and liquid it is impossible to penetrate them. Opal eyes. Her nose slopes in a clean curve, tilting abruptly upward at the tip. Wide nostrils. O Africa. Her lips are plump with Africa too, and she has a habit of wetting them with the tip of her tongue. The bone of her chin is firm and hard, with a thin strap of flesh beneath it, either baby fat that has not departed or the beginning of age. She is twenty-eight years old.

“Why are you alone?” he asks.

“I’m not alone,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “I’m sitting here with you in the rain.”

“You know what I mean,” he says. “Why don’t you have a man?”

“I’ve had men,” she says, and shrugs. “Lots of them. I’ve even had a husband.”

There is more in her eyes, more words struggling for expression, more images undescribed. They exist in the way she looks down at the table, in the way one hand kneads another on her lap. But she doesn’t go on. The waiter arrives with the food. Cormac doesn’t press her. He didn’t press her when he started going to the drugstore. Once a week. Saying hello. Ordering cigarettes. Or buying toothpaste. Thanking her and calling her by name. Seeing her smile. Watching like a teenager from across the street at closing time, screened by the crowd, discovering that no young man waited for her. In this part of her life, she was alone. He saw her hurrying into the subway. Trudging through piled snow. Bending into bitter winter winds driving hard from the North River. Always alone, bundled in a dark-blue knee-length down-lumpy coat and high-heeled black boots. Until finally he brought her a brightly wrapped book at Christmas and saw astonishment in her eyes. Pablo Neruda. In English and Spanish.

“Mil gracias,” she said that day.

“A usted,” he said.

The day before New Year’s Eve, he asked her to go to a movie. She accepted in a confused way, curious, wanting a diversion, resisting his approach, resisting contact or connection, perhaps men themselves. But accepting. She sat beside him in the dark, very still, very formal. Afterward, she thanked him, refused dinner, shook hands, and went off to the subway. A week later, he waited for her again where no young man yet waited. On that corner on Fourteenth Street. Once more they went to a movie. Then again, and after the third movie, they exchanged telephone numbers. On the phone, she was restrained, and he noticed how she spoke English with a very precise accent, hitting every d and t in words like “damned” and “Connecticut,” and pronouncing the g at the end of words like “talking,” “laughing,” and “eating.”

Now tonight they are having dinner. On each date, she has been guarded, careful, saying nothing of importance. She won’t tell him where she lives and doesn’t ask where he lives. They see a movie and then discuss it over coffee and then she says goodbye at the entrance to the subway. She treats him like an older man, but one in whom she has only marginal interest. And he urges patience upon himself, thinking: Don’t scare her off. Beneath the toughness, she’s capable of being easily scared.

“I feel funny when you stare at me that way,” she says, twirling fettucine on a fork. Her mouth is open, her hand poised with a pasta-laden fork.

“I can’t help it,” Cormac says, smiling casually. “You’re beautiful.”

“No, I’m not. “

“Liar.”

“I mean, I’m okay, I guess. But beautiful, hey, come on. Models, they’re beautiful. Cindy Crawford, yeah, or Naomi Campbell. Or that blond one, Gwyneth Paltrow. Movie stars are beautiful. Not me. I’m too short. I’m too fat. Those girls…”

She finally delivers the pasta to her mouth and eats hungrily, greedily. The rain begins to ease and so does she. At last. She’s from Queens, she says. She has been here since she was ten, when her mother brought her from Santo Domingo, along with a broken heart, forty-four dollars, and one suitcase of clothes. Her father was a piano player. Delfina remembers his dazzling smile and his aroma of Old Spice and little more. She has been told that he married another woman. He was small and skinny, though very handsome. The woman he lives with weighs three hundred pounds and is very ugly. Or so the story was told, on evenings in the kitchens of Queens.

“Do you want to talk about the husband?” Cormac says. “Your husband?”

“No,” she says, chewing the fettucine. “Not really…”

“Ni modo. It doesn’t matter.”

She finishes the pasta, pokes at the salad. Cormac is still only halfway through his burger. She stares at her plate, then rests her chin on her thumbs, her elbows on the edge of the table. The rain has ended. The backyard is alive with dripping sounds. She looks at him in a frank, deliberate way, then turns away.

“He was a junkie,” she says. She sips the rum drink without enthusiasm, as he lays aside the rest of the burger.

“I didn’t know that when I met him, of course. I was nineteen. He was thirty. I was a student at Hunter, thinking about teaching history.”

She pronounces it “heestory.”

“Then mad for physics…”

She chews the inside of her lip again, as if arranging the words.

“He… he saw me in the street, just like you did. And he followed me, just like you. And he hung around and waited for me….”

“Just like me.”

“Just like you.”

She smiles in a sad way and turns to watch the raindrops dripping down the wall, and when she turns back, her eyes are brimming.

“I went out with him, okay? To discos and parties, because it was exciting, because I had been studying since I was ten, because I was bored, because I wanted something that I didn’t even know I wanted. I went out with him because I was tired of being En Punto Cintron. Because I wanted to sleep late. All the usual stupid reasons. And then I got pregnant. My mother was hysterical. She thought I would lose my chance, you know? My big American chance. To graduate from college, to have a life. And she was right, of course. I mean, look where I’m working. Selling Bufferin and condoms to kids who think they can make me blush. Anyway, we got married. His name was Enrique, but his street name was Block, like he owned the block. The block was 117th Street, near Second Avenue, in El Barrio. His block. He was a Puerto Rican and made a lot of jokes about Dominicans. Most of them dirty. About Dominican women, and the special way they were supposed to like sex. He tried that a few times and got mad when I wouldn’t let him do it that way, and he would yell at me: ‘You’re Dominican!’ Like I was betraying my country!” She smiles. “A real schmuck.” The smile fades. “Me too. But he was nice for a few months. Then he started coming home late and then not at all and then he stopped working and you know, it was the same old story, the same old New York shit.”

The waiter arrives again, his irritation gone as he performs for a tip. He turns on an acting-class smile and tries being gracious. They order coffee. Delfina says she’s finished with her drink too. The ice cubes have melted. A second waiter leads a party of six to another table, wielding a large towel. They are laughing and loud.

“You don’t want to hear all this, do you?” Delfina says.

“Only if you want to tell it.”

She is quiet for a long time. The other table settles down. Mozart begins to play from the restaurant’s sound system. The Sonata No. 1 in C Major. But through the dripping wall behind them they can hear the bass line of another movie soundtrack and the muffled sound of explosions. Buildings blowing up. Shouts. The combination triggers something in her, releases a flood of words.

“I had a daughter,” Delfina says, talking as much to herself as to Cormac. “She was so beautiful. Carolina, her name was, same as my mother. My mother came to take care of me while I was pregnant because Enrique now, he was on the streets all the time, selling crack, shooting smack. I would see him, with the baby in my arms, and he would laugh and walk away. As thin as a fucking nail, he was now. Pardon my language. Hanging with all the crack zombies. My mother wanted me to come home to the house in Queens. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t face my friends again. All those kids I knew. The ones I left behind when I went to college. The problem was, when I got into Hunter, I acted like I was hot shit. And here I was two years later, another welfare mother. It was so… I don’t know—shameful? So I stayed on 117th Street. The more the goddamned zombies hit on me, the hotter I made myself look. And then I beat them off. If a friend of Enrique’s hit on me, I would say stuff like, ‘Your dick’s smaller than Block’s, cabrón, and his is a peanut.’ Hoping it got back to Enrique. Finally I got a job in a record store on Columbus Avenue, Tower Records, and my mother would baby-sit for me, coming all the way on the train, two trains, from Queens. All the time telling me, ‘Come home, m’hija, come home.’ All the time telling me, ‘We can go back to the D.R., we can go someplace else. You can go back to school. Get your degree. Start over.’ While I hugged the baby and went downtown to work in the record store.”

The coffee arrives, steaming in the chill spring air.

“It went on like that,” Delfina says. “Almost a year,” she says. “Until the fire.”

Cormac’s heart trembles. He knows what is coming, all the way from the dark streets of the past, all the way from the Five Points. He touches her hand and her flesh is cold as sorrow. She eases her hand away.

“They both died,” she says in a remote tone. “My mother and my daughter. And two other people on the floor upstairs. It was in the Daily News, on New York One. I always thought Enrique set it, and so did the cops, but they couldn’t prove it, and it didn’t matter anymore because by then he had the virus. The motherfucker was gonna die. I prayed it wouldn’t be quick.”

She sips her coffee, part tough slum kid, part grieving adult. She makes a face as if the coffee were bitter.

“I don’t remember much after the fire,” she says. “I was crazy for a long time. I made love to a lot of guys one year and then shut down like a nun.”

Neither speaks for several minutes, as the rain drips. He can think of no words that will not sound like horseshit. Laughter skitters around the backyard. More customers arrive, fresh from the movie house. Chairs scrape on brick. Tables fill. Cormac’s coffee is cold when he sips it and he signals for fresh cups. She looks directly at him now.

“Does it bother you when I say I slept with a lot of guys?”

“No. It’s a kind of consolation sometimes.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of a whore.”

“I could never think that.”

“It was part of the craziness,” she says. “Every day was different. On Monday, I wanted to die, to get the virus too, and just fucking die. Sometimes I saw myself on the Brooklyn Bridge, going over the side, or jumping out of the fucking Twin Towers. On Tuesday, I wanted to make another baby, get another Carolina, and start all over, and do it right this time, and watch her crawl and watch her walk and hear her talk and—”

“Stop,” Cormac says, remembering another woman, long ago, who longed for the same repaired life and spoke about it in French. “You don’t need to justify anything, Delfina. Not to me. Not to anyone. You got through it. You’re here. You’re eating food. You look beautiful.”

Now Cormac can hear the Sonata No. 9 in D Major. Filling the air, melding together the chatter of other tables. The music throws a wisp of another room and another century into his mind, and he forces himself to look at Delfina and hold her hand. Here. Now.

“I’m sorry to put all this in your head,” she says, her hand warming in the hand of Cormac. “I should go home.”

“Not yet. Please.”

She nestles against him, her fine wiry African hair unspooling against his face. He can feel one of her breasts against his arm. With one hand, he touches her hair, his fingers plunging into its springy fineness until he briefly feels the curve of the back of her skull, her skin as warm as blood.

And then she pulls away.

“I have to go,” she says.

“Wait. Let me pay and I’ll walk you to a cab.”

She touches her napkin to her eyes, quickly, so nobody can see the gesture. Cormac makes a scribbling sign to the waiter, who smiles and nods. Delfina inhales deeply, as if forcing a shift in memory, and then exhales slowly. She turns to Cormac and tries a smile.

“Okay, what about you?”

“What about me?”

“I told you about me. Now you have to tell me about you.”

He stares at the check, peeling off bills and adding the tip for which the waiter has performed so erratically.

“It’s a long story,” he says.

“Try,” she says.

“Where do you want me to start?”

“I don’t know. I know your name. I know you’re some kind of a writer and—did you say you were an artist too? A painter, right?” She pauses. “I know you’re very kind to me, even when I’m a pain in the ass. I know you speak Spanish and French and Italian.”

“And Yiddish. And German. And a little Latin too, mi vida.”

“But the rest of it, I don’t know anything,” she says. “Like how old are you?”

“Old enough to be your ancestor.”

She laughs.

Cormac doesn’t.

84.

Out on the wet sidewalk, he offers to take her home in a taxi. She thanks him and says she’ll find her way. An invisible shield is forming. Delfina Cintron is backing away.

“And listen,” she says, “I’m sorry I told you all that in there, you know, about myself.” Her face turns tougher. “I don’t know what that was all about.”

Flawless bands of red light from the Krispy Kreme store scribble across the wide street and are then ruined by passing taxis. Scarlet bubbles rise from the gutter like blood.

“I’m actually a little ashamed of myself,” she says. “It’s not like me.”

“Enough, Delfina. I’m flattered you said anything, so forget it.” She smiles a thin smile. Cormac wants to lean over and kiss her cheek and starts to put a hand on her shoulder. She turns stiffly, offers her hand instead, and he shakes it.

“I’ll call you,” Cormac says.

She nods in a casual way.

“See you,” she says. “Thanks for dinner.”

Then, looking cool and detached, Delfina Cintron adjusts the strap of her shoulder bag, thrusts her hands in the pockets of her raincoat, and starts walking quickly to the east.

Cormac watches her go, feels the impulse to follow, to shout her name, to take her arm, to feel her warmth: and does nothing. He lights a cigarette, as about fifty customers line up for the late movie. He inhales deeply. All of his life he has switched from smoking to not smoking. Cigars, pipes, and then cigarettes when they arrived, always for nine years at a time, followed by nine years of not smoking at all. Nicotine was the basic drug of the solitary. He loved the aroma when he started again, and hated it when he was finished. Now he’s in the final year of nine years of Marlboro Lights. He’ll be glad when they’re gone. Sometimes he thinks he’d be gladder if he were gone first.

He watches the young people as he smokes, the giggling girls, the macho boys. All Delfina’s age. They seem decent enough, doing what boys and girls have always done, some of them right here on this street. Flirting, lying, inventing themselves and each other. He wishes he could caution them: Listen, young man, that girl you are inventing does not exist; or, Listen, blissed-out girl, that perfect boy is not the one you’re gazing at. Cuidate, jovenes…. A siren splits the air, and he looks left, toward where Jay Gould’s Opera House once stood on the corner of Eighth Avenue and where, in a different time, Fred Astaire took his first dance lessons. Gone now too. Replaced by an ugly white-brick building that had something to do with a union. The ambulance pushes through traffic, siren screaming its useless tantrum, moving up Eighth Avenue. The last of the young people file into the lobby of the multiplex. Not one of them, he thinks, has ever heard of Jay Gould. Was he related to Jay-Z or something? And who was Fred Astaire? Cormac turns and walks east.

He pauses near the Flatiron Building, driven to a sheltering wall by a squall of rain, looking north over the expanse of Madison Square. Once the great boisterous laughing heart of the city, now a placid remainder of a heart bypass. On this night, flattened against the cowcatcher of the Flatiron, he sees again what nobody else can see. Bill Tweed laughing with his friends in the restaurant of the Hoffman House. The old Madison Square Garden, the first one, rickety and frail, rises across the north wall of the square, with its tentlike rooftops like a vision of Samarkand, and then coming down, after Commodore Vanderbilt, its ruthless owner, added a story and a wall collapsed and killed five people. Cormac stood there, making notes for the Herald as the Commodore’s pleasure palace was smashed into splinters and rubble and hauled away; stood there watching the new Garden rising, and Stanford White gazing at it in wonder, for the second Garden was his, his child, his masterwork, his personal pleasure palace too (in the rooms of the seven floors he occupied in the bell tower), and it was the one that would kill him. As always in the city of memory of which Cormac was the only citizen, Stanny is laughing in a triumphant pleasured way. The architect of desire. If only he had met Bill Tweed. What laughter they’d have shared.

Another siren in the night. A car horn blares.

“Move dat ding! Willya move dat goddam cah?”

That voice. That lovely hard demanding urgent New York accent. An accent like a fist. He wants to embrace the shouting man. To hear him talk. To hear that accent born in the Five Points, with Africans and Irishmen working as collaborators, the accent now almost gone, replaced by some weird (to Cormac) rhythm where every declarative sentence ends with a question mark. I was twenty years old? I need a newspaper? He looks for the faceless old New Yorker, but traffic is moving and the man is gone.

The rain eases now. Cormac crosses Broadway. Almost surely Delfina lives in East Harlem and has taken the Lexington Avenue subway uptown. He will take the same line downtown because he always takes the Lex if it’s possible. He loves it more than all the other lines. It was, after all, the first to cut through the city. And besides, he helped build it. And most important, it always makes him think about his father. On this night, his body trembles slightly. Perhaps soon he will see them all again in the Otherworld.

On the platform, a Chinese woman holds shopping bags in each hand. A man dozes on a bench. Three kids with portfolios talk solemnly about the use of encaustic and how you could get the effect on a Mac. Cormac gazes into the darkness of the tunnel.

He whistles a fragment of “Body and Soul” and remembers working with two dozen other men on the final section of the subway. The job was his own choice. Earth, air, fire, water: Who had urged him toward embracing them all? He’d seen too much fire. He’d helped build the aqueducts that brought the Croton water, and worked on the masonry of the reservoir where the Public Library now stands. He’d worked in the air high above the city. It was earth that was missing, deep earth, earth that was dirt, but earth that was granite.

And so he enlisted and came to 195th Street at St. Nicholas Avenue to work with a team of dynamiters, work that almost nobody else wanted. Most of the railroad had been driven through Manhattan using the technique of cut-and-cover. Up the East Side to Forty-second Street and then west to Longacre Square and north again. A trench was dug, the track laid, and then covered with steel grids, dirt, pulverized rock. Simple. A job where you could always see the sky. But at 195th Street they faced a granite ridge that could not be done that way. Here they must cut through rock sixty feet below the surface, mining a tunnel that was fifteen feet high and fifty feet wide. Deep bore, the technique was called. As was done in London.

That morning, as on other mornings, a foreman named Sullivan packed dynamite against the virgin face of the tunnel. He set the dynamite, then shouted for the men to clear the tunnel, and they retreated as far as they could go, to stand among the bobbing lanterns. Sullivan signaled for the blast, and they all plugged their ears with fingers. Even then the great ka-boom knocked some men down and a whoosh of sandy air sprayed all of them. Cormac heard falling rock, then silence, and all rose, to move forward to shovel the broken rock into mule-drawn carts.

Then came the second explosion.

The world blackened, and Cormac heard screams and the panicky bleats of the mules and rock falling in great heavy slabs and then silence.

When he looked up, there was a high jagged gash in the mine face. And from beyond the gash, he saw the emerald light.

And the figure of a man silhouetted against the light. Behind him, there was almost no passage back to the tunnel, but a man was groaning under one of the slabs. Cormac could hear muffled shouting too.

But he turned and moved forward, toward the dark figure. The light brightened, glowing, luminous, a radiating light that bathed all in its color.

It was his father.

Smiling.

“My son,” he said.

Cormac tried to hurry to him, but his legs felt encased in water.

“I’ll fetch your mother,” he said. “Wait…”

And then there was a rumble, and more slabs fell from the ceiling, and the emerald light vanished, and Cormac felt a thump, sharp cutting pain, and fell into a darkness.

In the hospital, his leg in a cast, his cuts and abrasions bandaged, he met the man who had been trapped. “Did you see it?” Cormac whispered. “Did you see the light? And the man standing in the light?”

“What light?” the man said.

85.

At the building on Duane Street, he uses the elevator key that will let him out on the top floor. He passes the two first floors, occupied by his most recent tenants, two separate groups of young dotcommers who labor above a stationery store. He passes the first of his own two floors and steps out into what he calls the Studio. He doesn’t switch on the lights, for he could walk blindfolded through this space and never knock over a lamp. But more important, the long dark loft shimmers with the illumination of the city. He closes the door behind him and stands for a moment in the magical glow. This is where he always comes to sit on the leather couch and listen to music in the dark or to drowse into skittering images of the past. He knows every inch of the place, the chairs and the tables, the file cabinets, the stacks of art books, and the closets full of drawings. Even when he’s alone, the room is crowded with the faces and names of the past.

He takes off his coat and jacket and loosens his tie, drops all on a brocade armchair, and then goes to a small refrigerator for an icy bottle of Evian water. His back is to the skylight. He twists open the cap, takes a long sip, sloshing his mouth with the cold, clear water. To his left, he can see the silhouette of the easel, holding a canvas completed forty-three years earlier. A painting done from memory. The face of the Countess de Chardon, parts of it lifted from old drawings, but her clothes all different. She is wearing clothes that could have been worn by Lauren Bacall. Clothes worn in this studio by a fashion model who was all over Vogue that year before going off to Europe, never to return. “That’s not my face,” the model said, looking at the painting. “It’s not even close.” He promised to do a separate drawing of the model, a portrait. “But who is she?” she said in an irritated way. Cormac smiled and said, “A woman I used to know.”

He sits down at the end of the couch, leans back, and looks up. The rain-streaked skylight is made of one hundred and twenty-six panes, nine across and fourteen down, often repaired and strengthened or replaced, but the grid as it was when Bill Tweed gave him the building. The skylight faces south, and he can see the green shimmering lights of the Woolworth Building to the left and the icy towers of the World Trade Center to the right. They give off a light that pulses through all of downtown, every night of the week. Down there, up there, over there, men and women are moving in a thousand offices, speaking eighty languages, working the markets from Tokyo to Geneva, making sales, making bets, creating the light. Capitalism in the midnight hour of its long triumph.

On this night, Cormac can’t see the tops of the towers. They’re shrouded in spring fog.

He thinks: I miss the sound of foghorns.

Remembering their mournful baritone voices as the great liners arrived before daylight from Europe. The way they crowded the harbor for the first sixty years of the last century and how they moved so majestically up the North River to the Midtown piers. And the next day the Daily News centerfold would show photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor or Clara Bow or Douglas Fairbanks, all posing on deck, the actresses propped up on piled steamer trunks, showing their legs. And how he sometimes went to the river when the great liners were sailing, the decks crowded with people waving toward the piers as they went off to somewhere else, and how he wished he could go with them, make his escape from Tir-na-Nog, and waved farewell himself, although he did not know a soul.

“What about you?” said Delfina Cintron.

Can he tell her about the foghorns in the morning dark?

“What about you?”

He wishes he could tell her the whole long tale.

Once he understood that he would live for many years, Cormac had worked hard at placing his nostalgias in a mental jail. This was an act of will and a means of self-defense. For a long time, New York (which is to say, the world) was as people thought it always would be, and then suddenly it changed, and the present was shoved forever into the past. There was never a sense of cataclysmic collapse, no shared admission that Rome was now finished. New Yorkers took for granted that nothing would ever remain the same, and nostalgia was their permanent protest. And because most of them were immigrants, they had begun their New York lives with aching memories of the places left behind. The habit never went away. Even now, in this latest city, they prefaced many remarks in the same way. “In the old days…” Or, “When I was a kid…” Or, “This place has gone into the crapper….” Russians said such things, and Chinese, and Dominicans, and Palestinians. You lived in the present, but that present always contained a past, some image of a ruined paradise.

Cormac noticed as the years passed that New Yorkers shared a sense that whatever had changed, they could do nothing about it. A kind of optimistic fatalism. Reformers arrived with golden promises and left office in disgrace and impotence. Bill Tweed’s line was a kind of municipal motto: “What are you gonna do about it?” Some of the big changes were welcome. He never met anyone who yearned for the city before the arrival of the Croton water, the city that smelled of shit. Nor did anyone protest the triumph of electricity, except those Uptown women who longed for the softening glow of gaslight. If the past had been reasonably happy, as New York had been before the collapse of 1893, the new present was drowned in permanent mourning, a lot of it dishonest, driven by a longing to return to the lost past. Cormac had gone through all that too many times. He had seen reputations blaze and then end up as burnt offerings. Heroes too often turned into scoundrels. Banks and corporations and newspapers ruled the city, and ended up as a handful of dust. Even language had term limits. In long separate eras, Cormac heard people use words like “fiddlesticks” or “groovy,” and then one morning, as if a secret referendum had been passed, the words vanished. Nobody, of course, ever ran a referendum against the word “bullshit.” That was a word and an emotion as permanent as the rivers. But the past had tremendous power here for the very simple reason that it was an American city that actually had a past. In his strange way (Cormac thinks now, swallowing cold Evian water) he is its custodian, he had been there, had smelled it, touched it, argued in it, fucked in it, killed in it; but he knew the treacheries and dangers of nostalgia. He was, after all, Irish. And he had too much past in his life. His defense against it was will. But even then, as in Madison Square only an hour earlier, will was never enough.

“To hell with the past,” he says out loud in the darkened Studio, gazing at the misty towers before him. And thinks of Simone Signoret, great blowsy actress whose memoir was called Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be.

And yet… And yet, there were moments, here in the loft, when he longed to see the lost city of chimney pots and slate roofs, all blue after rain. He wanted to stand in woods where wolves still howled. He wanted to sit in the Polo Grounds and look at Willie Mays. At such moments, here, or in Madison Square, or at other odd moments in banal places, it was as if the bars of the mental cage had turned elastic and the past had forced its way out. Anything could set it off: the fragment of a tune, a glimpse of sun on cobblestones in a forgotten street, an accidental encounter with a building where he once knew a woman and loved her, even if she did not love him back.

He watches a flock of tiny birds emerge from between the Twin Towers to fly past the upper stories of the Woolworth Building, heading east. They know where they’re going. He envies them for their freedom and their certainty, and lights a cigarette and sits there smoking in the dark.

86.

Cormac picks up his mail from the box he keeps in the post office on Vesey and Church. Big, ugly, solid stone post office, carrying the chiseled names of Robert Moses, master builder, and Fiorello La Guardia, master mayor, and the year of its unveiling, 1935. He riffles a sheaf of mail from his box. Bills. Time Warner cable service. Con Ed. The telephone company. A tax notice. And a plump brown envelope from the Argosy Clipping Service. He slips them into a cloth shopping bag, steps outside, smokes a cigarette. A Jamaican man is selling fruit from a cart. Messengers pedal by on bicycles. Men and women enter and leave the Jean Louis hair salon across Church Street. The sky is bright and traffic moves slowly from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, heading north. Bells toll in St. Peter’s on Barclay Street and are answered by the bells of St. Paul’s. Over everything, melding the sounds, he hears the murmuring, ceaseless drone of the city.

He crosses the street into the Borders bookstore, glances at the new books in paperback and the displays of bestsellers. On each visit, he hopes to be surprised. He seldom is. Today is Saint Patrick’s Day and so one table is stacked with Books of Irish Interest: Joyce, the McCourts, Seamus Heaney, Yeats. Along with cookbooks and guidebooks and songbooks. He moves past them, browsing, touching, his hands caressing covers, allowing images to flash into him: Mayan temples, Brazilian prostitutes, bombed-out London. He chooses a new translation of Dostoyevsky’s Demons, which he has always known as The Possessed. Paperback. Seventeen dollars. A week’s pay in the year the post office opened. Three times what he earned in a week in 1840. When he first read the novel a century earlier, he was reminded of his friends in the Fenian Brotherhood and its endless, sometimes hilarious debates about the use of terror against the English enemy. What if someone innocent dies? What do you mean by innocent? And suppose the fella is not in a state of grace? Will you follow him to Hell? One of their offices was on Cortlandt Street, up above a man who made barrels, the building plowed away in 1969 to make way for the Trade Center. He wrote for their newspaper. Or one of their newspapers. And wondered which of them worked for the police. There were good people among the Fenians, along with a few lunatic true believers. Thinking about them years later, he realized that certain Irish exiles were pure Dostoyevsky.

He pays for the book, adds it to his shopping bag, then goes down the escalator from Borders and out into the endless concourse until he finds an ATM. He has no personal credit cards, but he does have a bank card in the name of ABCDuane Real Estate and he takes two hundred dollars from the company checking account. People in personalized green bunting are hurrying in every direction, buying sandwiches and sushi, cold drinks and coffee. Green ties, green shirts, green slacks, green dresses. Buttons that say, “Kiss me, I’m Irish.” Many move down the escalators to the PATH trains, and Cormac wonders why anybody is going to New Jersey at one-thirty in the afternoon. Then thinks: Who am I to judge? I’ve never been there myself.

He heads south for the exit on Liberty Street, avoiding a hundred possible collisions in the frantic rush of the mall. One window of Sam Goody’s is filled with Irish music. The Chieftains. The Clancy Brothers. Luke Kelly. De Danann. U2. He goes in, wondering for a moment whether it’s time to buy a DVD player, to add one more piece of technology to his life. Come to my house, Delfina, and I’ll explain the journey from a blacksmith’s forge to the DVD version of The French Connection. Thinking: My life is absurd.

He buys a CD of the old music. Celtic music older than Saint Patrick. Along with Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The Berlin Philharmonic conducted by von Karajan. All about the Otherworld and the dark powers of the Queen of Night.

In the Liberty Street vestibule, four homeless men huddle near the doors. Filthy. Eyeless in Gaza. In the 1890s, there were Bed Lines, for men ruined by the collapse, and when the post office was built, there were breadlines. Now there are homeless shelters where nobody wants to sleep. These four men must sleep here, where Cortlandt Street used to be. One of them, his white beard sprouting from dark brown skin, wears a plastic shamrock.

He has lunch in a sushi place, his eyes wandering from laminated views of Kyoto to the swift hands of the chef. He sits at the bar, those hands in front of him, clipping, trimming, carving. Like a great swordsman.

He doesn’t look at the bills or the envelope full of press clippings. They can wait. He opens the Dostoyevsky. By the time he finishes his platter, he’s laughing.

87.

He spreads the clippings on the dining table on the lower floor. Cindy Adams. Liz Smith. Mitchell Fink. Some scraps from Page Six. Others from Rush & Malloy. There’s a spread in Town & Country, with handsome photography and views of a Hamptons beach, and a talk with William Hancock Warren across three pages in Editor & Publisher. Most of the stories he has read in the local newspapers, but there are odd clippings from the Rocky Mountain News (about a charity event in Aspen) and a sarcastic column from the Guardian, about Willie Warren’s most recent trip to London, where he met with his tailor, the editor of the Times, and Tony Blair, in that order.

Cormac pushes them around on the polished mahogany table, as if trying to make a collage that will reveal their meaning. He sighs. There is no meaning beyond the one that brought him to New York across the ocean sea. The ancient vow. The oldest contract. He feels sludge congealing inside his skull.

He turns away from the clippings, imagines himself telling Bill Tweed the story. “What?” Tweed says. “You made a promise two hundred and sixty fucking years ago—and you’re going to keep it?” His belly rolls and heaves. “You are a lunatic, Cormac. You’re living some insane dream. Forget this nonsense and jump on a woman, or order a steak!”

Cormac laughs too. And then he sees his father’s body in the doorway and his mother in the mud. And the words come back, the words that have never left him. His father: They must be brought to the end of the line. And Mary Morrigan on the people who are barred from the Otherworld: Those who fail to avenge injustice. For want of courage. For want of passion. If an unjust act is done in the family of a man or woman, it must be avenged.

Such words have shaped his life, he thinks, and he can’t roll them back. He gazes out through the windows, then takes a deep breath and returns to the clippings. There, smiling and a bit suety in excellent reproduction, is William Hancock Warren. He is not the last of the Warren line, perhaps, but he’s the most recent Warren to come to New York. He will have to stand for all the rest, scattered as they are around the world. He appears, he’s here, I must act, or… Warren has an eighty-one-foot yacht in the North River, a Fifth Avenue apartment, an eight-bedroom mansion in Southampton, designed (so they say) on the back of an envelope by Stanford White, and a thirty-one-room compound in Palm Beach. The chalet in Aspen is a minor property, and the place in Klosters is merely leased. Willie Warren: newspaper publisher supreme. Now courted, always photographed in public places. A fresh young prince of New York. Cormac smiles and thinks: How can I think of killing a man called Willie?

In many of the pictures, and most of the texts, there is also Elizabeth. The standard British trophy wife, with a vague genealogy and an untested claim to bloodlines going back to the Battle of Hastings. A model for a few years, adored by French and Italian photographers for her high cheekbones, long neck, elegant shoulders, and sleek black hair. She was on seven Vogue covers in two years and featured in spreads in Majorca and Rio, Cancun and Istanbul, all of them now in a separate folder in the file cabinet in the cubicle at the rear of the upstairs Studio.

The modeling is over, a phase, she explained to one interviewer, exciting and rewarding and educational, but a phase. She has not modeled for anyone since meeting Willie Warren. The stories imply that she has one responsibility now: to be lean and perfect. To be perfect at dinner and (Cormac supposes) perfect in bed. To be perfect when doing her charity work, campaigning against land mines, visiting the poor, the crack babies, the homeless in Thanksgiving Day shelters, where she exudes a luminous perfection that keeps everyone at bay, except, of course, the paparazzi. She visits the maimed, injured, luckless casualties of life, the flashbulbs flutter, and she’s gone.

Cormac slides the clips around one final time, then assembles them like cards and gets up, thinking: They have no children. Why? Don’t they have the usual dynastic ambitions of the rich? Are they free of the need to pass on their things and their houses to another generation, to be sure there will be no end to this branch of the line? Or are they merely waiting, like yuppies, until all is secure in life and business? Cormac walks to the spiral staircase and winds around the steps to the upper Studio. He flicks on lights, opens the door to the small office he calls the Archive, and goes in. The wall to the right is completely covered with corkboard, most of it occupied by the Warren family tree. He drops the fresh clips into a wire basket, to be filed later, then pauses.

“The other curse of my twice-cursed life,” he says, and laughs, gazing at the family tree. “Jesus Christ…”

For more than a century, he has been gathering the documents in the Archive, the whole long saga of the Warrens who were the descendants and other relatives of the Earl of Warren. Certificates of births and deaths; newspaper clippings; obscure memoirs; yellowing hand-scrawled letters, real estate transactions, accounts printed in private; regimental histories. They have been retrieved through correspondence or through serendipity (in auction rooms, on the shelves of antiquarian booksellers) and in a flood these past ten years through the Internet. My hobby, Cormac often tells himself. My demented obsession. What I collect instead of stamps or coins.

On the far wall, the known faces of the Warrens exist in drawings and old engravings, crude woodcuts and reproductions of paintings, along with one photograph of a Warren made in the 1930s by Horst. On a map of the world, Cormac has placed flags in all the places they are known to have gone: India and Afghanistan and Nepal, Syria and Palestine, places where they preached the Christian virtues of British civilization to Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists, raising holy British rifles against heathen scimitars, dividing one religion against another, one province, one tribe, one family: dividing and dividing, while helping themselves to plunder.

The Warrens didn’t invent that world, Cormac knew, but they did not struggle very hard against it. They went to Shanghai and Hong Kong, where some of their ships carried opium from the British fields of Burma to the Chinese. “We are surely doing God’s work,” one Warren wrote home. “They cannot be permitted to resist us, or they will be resisting Christ.” This one joined the patriotic killing spree called the Opium Wars to force their drugs on an endless supply of heathen customers. Beijing, where a mad Warren missionary, his head full of God and sin and the redemption of the poor pagans (as well as of himself), walked out bravely to face the Boxers in 1900 with only a cross and a Bible. His head ended up on a pike, and the rebels wiped their asses with his Bible.

Here on the wall is the American branch, budding and tentative in Philadelphia after the Revolution, flowering in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, where years later its members employed Pinkertons against Molly McGuires, using gunshot and ambush to keep the anthracitic cash flowing, eventually giving way to the harder, more modern, more ruthless will of the Rockefellers. One of the Warrens entered steamboat manufacture along the Mississippi after the Louisiana Purchase, building a grand mansion in the Garden District of New Orleans, investing in cotton and helping finance the Confederacy. Another burrowed mines in Colorado and then, as thousands of factories opened across the Northeast and the first automobiles from Detroit rattled comically on lumpy American streets, his children discovered the black liquid pleasures of oil. Out there, in the lands stolen from Mexico, was the true El Dorado, filled with black gold. More lucrative than the slave trade and free of any moral qualms.

Not all of them were parasites or predators. Two died at Gettysburg, and one at Antietam, fighting for the Union, helping free the ancestors of men and women brought to America by the earl and his friends. One of the remaining British Warrens, Richard Benoit Warren, died trying to save an Irish enlisted man in the second Battle of the Somme (and his great-grandfather had fed the starving Irish during the Famine, without asking them to become soupers). A young man whose legs were broken in a barroom brawl—his name was Charles Asquith Warren—became a Communist, worked in the slums of the New England mill towns (in spite of his limping gait), joined the Lincoln Brigade to fight in Spain in 1936, and was killed in the Battle of the Jarama. One Warren was killed at Anzio. One died on Iwo Jima.

Some simply vanished, of course, to die in failure or brawls or forgotten wars in strange places. But the known ones are here on the wall, and their tales are here in the Archive. There is very little about the earl and nothing about the son who died during the American Revolution. None of the narratives mention Cormac Samuel O’Connor.

Cormac couldn’t kill them all, of course, and didn’t want to. Even if he’d had the desire, as a prisoner of the blessing of Africa he couldn’t leave Manhattan to track them down. Very early, he decided that the Warrens would only matter to him if they invaded this place, this granite island, this Manhattan. If they entered these turreted castle grounds (he said, mocking himself as the Irish Edmund Dantes), he would send them off to join the sea-scoured bones of the earl.

But after Cormac killed the earl’s son, the Warrens did not try again to establish themselves in New York. It was as if they believed that some invincible curse hovered in the New York streets, mysterious, spooky, fatal. And besides, America was big enough. None of them tried to drive roots here until the arrival of William Hancock Warren. Who is here now, defying family superstition and ancient history. The first Warren in more than two centuries to take up residence in Manhattan. There are seven photographs of the man here, including one as a boy and one taken at his wedding. The man smiles. The man’s eyes twinkle. In one image, dressed in a tuxedo, he is juggling three balls. Cormac thinks: He doesn’t know I exist. He doesn’t know he is my quarry.

88.

Cormac dials Delfina’s number, but there is no answer. Her answering machine gives only a number, no name, but it’s her voice, hoarse and whispery. He leaves his name and number. He walks around the Studio in the gray afternoon light and begins to sing. Each time I see a crowd of people… just like a fool I stop and stare… He loves to sing. He sits at the piano and sings. He walks the streets and sings. Thousands of songs are parked in memory, from Bowery theaters to Prohibition speakeasies, from vaudeville to Rodgers and Hart, many of them fragments, some of them complete, and when he plays Sinatra or Tony Bennett, Johnny Hartman or Lady Day, they are all duets. I know it’s not the proper thing to do… He sings to Miles Davis CDs too, and to Ben Webster. He sings French with Piaf and Becaud and in Spanish with Tito Rodriguez… but he never dances. He can’t dance. Or he won’t risk it. Never in public, seldom when alone. Long ago, in the time when Master Juba and John Diamond were inventing tap-dancing in the Five Points, in an exuberant collision of Africa and Ireland, he decided that white people had no gift for dancing. At least not for American dancing. The waltz, perhaps. The minuet. But it was better when the rhythms moved more quickly, when drums and bass came in a rush, to sit this one out. And perhaps it wasn’t white people, for after all, there were Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse. It wasn’t white people, it was Cormac Samuel O’Connor. He could not dance. It was as simple as that. He yearned to dance, but had been taught by life that every man has his limitations. Dancing was as far from him as basketball.

Now he goes downstairs to the living area, to the book-lined walls, the dark bedroom. He is bound for his daily nap. Since the 1890s, this has been his indulgence, his pleasure, his necessity. The siesta (he always insists to his friends) is the most civilized of all institutions sent to us from the Mediterranean. The gift of Spain and Italy, and perhaps of Islam. The siesta gives him two mornings. The siesta allows his worries to marinate in his brain, where solutions can be found for riddles, and always grants him on awaking a refreshed clarity. In the back bedroom, thick drapes seal off light and muffle sound. The daily routine is almost always the same: lunch, then a siesta, and then down to the streets for his walk, which he calls his Wordsworth.

He traces this ambulatory habit to reading the great poet when he was young. One variation on the Wordsworth were the years in the 1890s that he spent trying to photograph every building on the island. The years he spent trying to freeze a city that could not be frozen. Now most of those buildings exist only as photographs, and almost every leafy glade in Manhattan has been paved, but he continues walking. Sometimes he takes the subway to some distant stop and does the Wordsworth all the way home. On weekends, when trucks are gone from the streets, along with thousands of suburban cars, he takes his bicycle to the streets and pedals for miles. He never walks fewer than twenty blocks and never pedals less than sixty. In the 1970s, he began riding the bicycle late on summer nights, when the asphalt had cooled, and there he would see mysterious black riders, each a solitary, each on a ten-speed, each with shorts and helmet and backpack, all, like him, indulging the loneliness of the long-distance rider. One night, pedaling into Central Park after midnight, he saw one of these riders and was certain it was Quaco. They glanced at each other. He saw Quaco’s eyes, his nose and mouth and line of jaw, and Cormac said hello in Yoruba, hello and nice night, and the man said yes in Ashanti, yes, a nice night. They pedaled away, and he never saw the man again.

He can’t go more than three days without the Wordsworth. He needs the regular flushing of blood and lungs, particularly in the years when he smokes. But he also wants the multiple layered visions of the changing city and the provocations of memory. A bar called Grogan’s becomes Farrelly’s and then Mangan’s, and then the Flowing Tide, and then Chapo’s, and then the Quisqueya Lounge, and never stops being a bar. One spring, an entire block vanishes from Chelsea to be replaced by white-brick humming apartment houses. A factory is turned into lofts. He needs to see it all, to be in the city as it is and not a prisoner of the city as it was. To watch the change as it happens helps him combat the sludge.

He never gets tired, even during the years when he smokes. The trick he has learned is a simple one: focus only on the twenty feet directly in front of him. Move with willed looseness through that closed space (eating time along with space), and avoid looking at any point in the distance. That imposing hill will exhaust you, he says to himself. You will never get past that dense warren of factories. Twenty feet: That’s the immediate goal. The habits of the Wordsworth mirror the habits of his life.

Now he removes his clothes and takes an old cotton night-shirt from a wall peg. He lies on the bed, but sleep does not come easily on this afternoon.

The quarry rises in his mind.

89.

Twelve years earlier, nobody in New York knew the name of William Hancock Warren. Now Cormac is thinking about him each day and seeing him in dreams. He must have been known, of course, by bankers and brokers, by a few well-tipped headwaiters, by the manager of the Plaza or the Pierre, the Stanhope or the Sherry-Netherland. But he didn’t live here and was not yet a public figure. His name was buried in the middle of the Forbes and Fortune lists, among the largely anonymous people who had more money than they could ever spend but not so much that they faced curiosity and scrutiny. Those who knew him well enough to call him Willie lived in Houston and London and the endless Arab emirates. He was as comfortable in the desert cities of Saudi Arabia as he was in the deserts near Palm Springs. Some of his older friends, including those from the House of Saud, had known his father, a man who’d risen from the oil fields of Oklahoma during the Great Depression and hammered together his own security and wealth with judicious bribes to politicians of both parties and a passion for anonymity. For the first thirty-two years of his life, William Hancock Warren was true to his father’s style.

Nine months after his father died in Texas, aged eighty-one, and buried discreetly, with two of his pallbearers retired officers of the Central Intelligence Agency, the son moved to Manhattan with his wife. They bought a seven-bedroom triplex one block north of the Frick, but this caused no sensation. Such men arrive periodically in New York, tarry awhile, and then leave. William Hancock Warren was among those who stayed, who found life and purpose in Manhattan. But he was here for a year before Cormac saw his name in a gossip column and another three years before the public became aware of his presence. He bought real estate in deals that attracted little attention. A Chelsea warehouse here, some West Side apartment houses there, an ancient office building on William Street, which he quietly closed for rehab. He avoided the fashionable restaurants, the charity ball circuit, the seasonal cycle of opera and theater openings. He stayed away from politicians and so eluded those prying journalists who inspected campaign contributions. He wasn’t part of anyone’s A list for dinner parties. He invested in Internet companies, to be sure, but in those years such companies were not covered by the general press. Occasionally he lunched with a business acquaintance at the Century Association, but he did not become a member. His name did not appear in the columns of Liz Smith, Cindy Adams, or Rush & Malloy, and Page Six did not seem to know of his existence. In the style of his father, William Hancock Warren preferred to be a member of the anonymous rich.

Then, only nine years ago, he emerged as a public figure as if visiting from the planet Krypton. That was when Cormac first saw his photograph. The occasion was an acquisition that he must have known would put him in the public eye. No baseball team was for sale that year and the football teams were prisoners of long leases in New Jersey. So William Hancock Warren did what so many other rich young American men do when they want more than money: He bought a newspaper.

The New York Light was not, to be sure, a thriving enterprise. It was a large dull broadsheet, full of Wall Street news and stories from the police blotter. It was the last afternoon newspaper in New York, with a loyal, aging readership that bought it at Grand Central and Penn Station for the long ride to the suburbs or had it delivered to their apartment buildings on the East Side. A few serious gamblers read it for news from West Coast racetracks, and businessmen trusted its closing stock prices and analyses of earnings reports. But its gray pages repelled many other New Yorkers, and reporters from the morning newspapers said that it bridged the generation gap between the living and the dead.

For eighteen years the Light had been owned by a foundation, whose members stated that they felt a civic obligation to subsidize the second-oldest newspaper in the United States. The staff was small, the advertising thin, the losses substantial, but after all the paper went back to 1835, the year that James Gordon Bennett started modern journalism with the New York Herald. Among the survivors, only the New York Post could trace its lineage back to an earlier time, the year 1801, when Alexander Hamilton assembled a group of New Yorkers to serve his interests and those of the Bank of New York. But as time passed, the clubby old-guard members of the Light Foundation began dying off, carrying what was left of noblesse oblige into their marble crypts, and their children preferred yachts and airplanes and houses in Southampton or Positano to civic duty in New York. One June morning in 1991, on page one of the Light, the board announced that if a new buyer was not found within two weeks, they would fold the paper. Other newspapers wrote mournful editorials, but their owners were rooting for the Light to die. It was a hindrance, another competitor for space on newsstands, and in the privacy of their offices they dismissed any hope for its survival as mere sentimentality. Several semi-insane owners of parking lots and grocery chains offered to buy the Light for a dollar and operate it for at least a year. Each got a few minutes on local television; but sane men knew that it was doubtful that even a one-dollar check from such men would clear at the bank. The surviving members of the foundation didn’t want to be remembered for selling the Light to a lunatic. In stepped William Hancock Warren.

“New York without the Light,” he said in a press release, “would be like New York without the Statue of Liberty.”

On the Fourth of July that year, Warren handed the foundation a check for one million dollars, which the surviving members promised would be used to study threats to the First Amendment. The fireworks on the Hudson seemed like acts of celebration for the newspaper. “Re-born on the 4th of July!” their page-one headline said the following day. And when the holiday ended, William Hancock Warren walked into the rat-infested building on West Street where the Light had been published since 1947, its fourth location since its foundation in a three-story building on Beaver Street. He uttered only one sentence to the assembled television cameras, and as Cormac watched that evening on channel 4, the words jolted his heart: “I’m a descendant of people who lived in New York before the Light was born! I hope to see it flourish and live to an even riper old age!”

Cormac thought that night: This cannot be. His most natural reflex, taught to him by living a very long life, was doubt. A wise old editor had said to him once, “If you want it to be true, it probably isn’t.” But then he saw Warren’s eyes and the familiar features (only marginally altered by the work of generations) and once more resumed a search that had lasted in some ways all his years. He read everything he could find about the man who, in print, was now being called Willie Warren. This wasn’t much, but he subscribed to the Argosy service anyway. Thinking: I don’t want it to be true, so it probably is. If this was the last of one branch of the Warren line, the old vows required him to act. He wished he had the sword. His father’s sword. He wished the sword were there to connect him to the younger man he once was, full of certainties. And there was something else pressing upon him now.

He wanted more than ever to find the dark lady marked by spirals. She had nothing to do with the Warrens and the curse of Ireland. She was part of a separate story. And yet her story and the story of the Warrens were coming together, forced into union by the pressure of time. He had found a dark lady. Delfina Cintron. But he did not yet know if she bore the markings, if she was the dark lady. Caution kept him from making the discovery. Caution, and a kind of fear. If she did not bear the markings, he would go on and on and on, like the North River. If she did, he could be entering his final days. At last. And he could not go to that ending without completing the unfinished business of the other story, the demand for completion imposed on him by family and tribe. My father first, he thought, and then, with any luck, Delfina Cintron, and finally release and a swift passage into the emerald light.

The newspapers told Cormac that on the day Willie Warren moved into the publisher’s office, he took calls of congratulation from the mayor, the governor, and the president of the United States. That day, he also hired Howard Rubenstein to handle his press relations, and his secretary referred all other calls to the Rubenstein office. The trade press cobbled together stories, using words and phrases like “quixotic” and “deep pockets” and “amateur,” while predicting that no matter what Warren did, the Light was doomed. The losses would be immense. The rich boy would eventually turn his attention to other toys. Prepare the obits now. In Cormac’s solitude, he agreed.

Everybody was wrong.

In the months that followed the purchase, Cormac’s old newspaperman’s heart quickened as he saw Warren make a series of superb moves. He hired an excellent editor and left him alone on all matters involving the news. He gave the editor a budget that allowed him to expand the tiny staff with a mixture of seasoned professionals and passionate youngsters. He hired Milton Glaser to give the paper a new look, and one Monday morning it became a broadsheet with the graphic energy of a tabloid. Bold and bright, without being loud. He started building a new color-printing plant in Brooklyn, which would get the newspaper around Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, delivered to doorsteps. His trucks could enter Manhattan when incoming traffic was light and copies of the paper were soon stacked on the newsstands at Penn Station and Grand Central when commuters headed home. He hired away a few star columnists from the News and the Post to add some personality to the Light’s sober news pages, paying them twice the money they were getting at the papers they left behind. He tripled the space in the sports section and encouraged huge action shots from his photographers. He sent handwritten notes to reporters when they did solid stories, gave bonuses to those whose stories were picked up by television, made certain that notes were sent to staff members on their birthdays and wedding anniversaries or when death took place in a family. He advertised heavily in the subways and in the foreign-language press. The editorial pages, which he controlled, became a model of judiciousness, and the op-ed pages were intelligent and well-written without ever talking down to the readers. He added no fuel to any municipal fire. He endorsed Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani and even had nice things to say about Al Sharpton. For the first time in decades, Cormac began to see people reading the Light on the subways.

William Hancock Warren was also lucky. He bought the newspaper at almost the precise moment when the boom started. His own holdings boomed. But so did the city of New York. Crime was down. Money was flowing. People began going out again at night. New businesses opened every day of the week. Warren expanded his business pages and insisted on covering both the Internet and the media. The young dot-commers began reading the paper and then advertising in it. The Light became the newspaper of the boom. But his editors knew that they needed more than the brash kids to read their paper. Warren read a biography of Joseph Pulitzer and decided to follow the old man’s example by covering the huge immigration wave. The Light became the immigrants’ newspaper, defending them, telling stories of their progress, running a column about green cards and visas and the process of naturalization. The word got around. Those immigrants who were learning English began reading it, and more important, so did their children. Then, about two years ago, he made a move that drove a tormented ambiguity into Cormac’s heart.

He announced that the Light was moving into a building on Park Row. Across the street from City Hall. Up the block from J&R Music World. He could do it now, the Rubenstein office explained, because the computer had freed newspapers from the plants in which they were printed. You could write a story on a high floor in Park Row and it would be printed miles away in Brooklyn. The other newspapers were all produced that way. Now it was the turn of the Light. And the city room would be located on Park Row.

Cormac wanted to weep. Once upon a time, he had worked on thirteen different newspapers on Park Row. As a reporter, a rewrite man, a copy editor, a typesetter. He had watched Walt Whitman sleep on the floor of one of those papers and had shown young Sam Clemens how they set type in New York. After the Civil War, Cormac had seen Father Dongan organize the orphaned newsboys and force the publishers to buy them shoes and get them doctors (the largest donations came from Bill Tweed). He’d walked past Hearst and Pulitzer in the lobbies and drunk with Brisbane in the whorehouses of Chapel Street. In those days, Park Row wasn’t just a distinct neighborhood; it was a kind of civilization, peopled by gaudy men of rapacious ambitions and appetites, great talent, enormous weaknesses, and much fun. Too much fun to last. Cormac had seen the Park Row papers die or move away, until all of them were gone by 1931. And here came a man who said that the past was now the future.

In spite of himself, in spite of a terrible ancient vow, in spite of history and memory, part of him began to root for William Hancock Warren.

For eight years, he watched and compiled his files and secretly applauded Warren’s growing triumph. For those eight years, he gazed at dark-skinned women on his walks through the city and turned away from them. After so many years of too much time, he wanted more time now, to see where Warren’s project would go, to postpone fate, to wait until he found the true dark lady. The century was winding down. The Wall Street boom rolled on.

Then, on a sweaty day in August, he saw Delfina Cintron.

She calls after he returns from his walk. She is cool but not distant. They make a date for the theater. Next week. Under the marquee. Then she says good-bye, and he stands there, holding the cordless phone. I must move more quickly, he thinks. I must move closer to her, and soon, to find out if I can love her. I who have loved no woman for so many years. He gazes out toward Church Street, thinking: It’s much more difficult to love than to kill.

90.

At ten after eight in the morning, Cormac is in Mary’s Café on the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway. He’s gone past the cakes on baroque display, and the counters where lone men crunched well-done English muffins and read the New York Post, past the booths on the right with their view of rain-swept Chambers Street. He wishes he could bring Delfina here and try to explain who Miss Subways was, as seen in all the posters hung like historical artifacts upon the coffee shop walls. But he is here to meet Healey, his friend, his last friend, who knows all about Miss Subways (and even dated one for three marvelous weeks in 1959), and so he has picked a table as far back in the large rear room as he can go, pushed up against fake leather banquettes. The choice of Mary’s was not entirely up to Cormac. The waitresses here know Healey, and that makes things much easier. And this is Tuesday, the day when Cormac and Healey have their weekly breakfast and the waitresses are prepared for whatever comes their way.

Cormac is always happy here and not simply because Mary’s is a few blocks from where he lives. The corner of Broadway and Chambers has been part of his life from the beginning. Across the street to the right is the corner of the old Common, where the Africans and Irish were burned or hanged in 1741. To the left stands the building where he once worked as a clerk for Alexander T. Stewart. Forgotten now, but once one of the three richest men in America. And that building (now covered with rigging as part of a rehab) was Stewart’s masterpiece. The Marble Palace, it was called after it opened in 1848, and it was the first department store in New York. With that concept, and fixed prices (no bargaining, but no giving goods to your relatives for half price either), Stewart changed the city. He was a tough, reticent, decent man from Lisburn in Northern Ireland (he sent food and clothes and money to Ireland during the Famine). He started in his twenties, importing linen from the mills of the North, and then gambled everything on the Marble Palace. Everyone predicted disaster: It was on the wrong side of the street, with the Five Points at its back. A department store? In the era of specialized shops? When you visited a button shop for buttons and a lace shop for frills and a haberdasher for hats? The notion was too radical, too… common. But Stewart made it work. Cormac wonders what A. T. Stewart would have made of his friend Healey. He knows what Healey would have made of Bill Tweed, whose twelve-million-dollar courthouse is halfway down the block. He’d have asked the Boss for a list of the places where he wanted him to vote.

Like some of his other friends over the years, Cormac enjoys Healey’s company too much to tell him the story of his life, even part of it. The rule behind most New York friendships is “don’t ask, don’t tell.” If Healey doesn’t ask, Cormac will not tell. Healey never asks. He’s the last of the old-style bohemians, the author of three good plays that had long runs off Broadway in the early 1960s, which meant he was shaped by the 1950s, when the worst sin of all was to name names. He’s a reformed drunk who now walks twenty-seven blocks, in rain, snow, or summer heat, to meet Cormac for their weekly breakfast. He’s also very loud, which is why the waitresses place them near the coffee shop’s outfield wall. Healey is loud because in the battle for the Chosin Reservoir in 1951, he lost half his hearing when a Chinese mortar exploded fifteen feet away from his left eardrum. “I’ve got a good ear for dialogue,” he used to say. “I just wish I had two.” He doesn’t write anymore, but he lives decently on royalties, since one of his plays is always being performed somewhere. He retired from writing when his stupendous young second wife ran off with a bass player. He now claims that he wrote all of his plays for her and after she left, whenever he tried to write, her face always appeared over his desk. The result was fury and sorrow, followed by paralysis and too much drinking. He stopped writing first, and then stopped drinking. The writing did not come back. He and Cormac have been friends for eleven years, and Healey has never mentioned anything about Cormac’s unchanged features, the absence of marks of age. It’s as if the playwright listens to Cormac but doesn’t see him. He has never been to Cormac’s house, nor has Cormac been to his. They sometimes meet in bars, where Healey drinks great quantities of Diet Pepsi, or here at Mary’s for breakfast.

Now Healey is making his entrance again, huge and wide-eyed, dressed in a plaid Irish hat, his anorak dripping with the morning rain. His shoes make a squishing sound as he passes alarmed customers. When he reaches the table, smiling with his mouthful of yellow teeth, he heaves his soaked shoulder bag to Cormac’s side of the banquette. He rips off the anorak and hangs it on a wall hook and leaves the hat on top of his head.

“Jesus Christ, what a filthy morning!” he bellows. “And there’s nothing left to look forward to now when you wake up! Kathie Lee is gone! No more slave labor in Thailand to worry about! Jesus Christ, no more infernos on cruise ships! What will we do without her, man? What will keep the pulse of the metropolis pulsing after breakfast? We’re doomed, man! Kathie Lee is history!”

Cormac suggests (as Healey sits down heavily, making the banquette wheeze) that maybe there’d be some Kathie Lee videos he could buy. Kathie Lee’s Greatest Hits. The Golden Age of Kathie Lee.

“No, no. No, they can’t do that, man! What made her so great—what made her an artist, man—is it was LIVE! No script! It was happening right there in front of your fucking eyes, man. That’s why she’s such a great artist, you dig?”

A waitress named Millie comes over. Everybody named Dotty, Penny, Ginger, and Bridget has passed into history, and here must be the last Millie left in Manhattan. Mary’s Café is that kind of place; nobody is ever named Heather and everybody knows about Miss Subways. Millie is fifty, heavy, with a wicked mouth on her when she wants to be wicked. Cormac cherishes her.

“What’s yours, hon?” she says, meaning both of them.

“The usual,” Healey says.

“Let’s see: scramble three, crisp bacon, whole wheat toast, coffee, no milk, fake sugar.”

“As always, you got it perfect, Millie.”

“You the same?”

“Why not?” Cormac says.

“He actually likes oatmeal,” Healey says. “It’s an Irish thing.”

“Our oatmeal tastes like cement,” Millie says.

“That’s why he likes it.”

“I’ll take the egg,” Cormac says. “Four minutes, rye toast.” “You got it, sweetheart,” Millie says, and hurries away.

“I love waitresses who call me ‘sweetheart,’ ” Cormac says.

“So marry her.”

“Why ruin a romance?”

Healey takes the News and the Post from his bag, the headlines filled with RUDY and DONNA, the latest chapter in the pathetic saga of the mayor in love.

“You read the papers yet? I mean, watching Rudy manage women is like watching an ostrich shit.”

Cormac laughs. Millie comes back with a basket of rolls, Danish, butter and marmalade, and a tall white plastic pot of coffee. Healey and Cormac start eating out of the basket. Healey taps the tabloids.

“I gotta terrible confession to make,” he says. “I’m starting to feel sorry for that Giuliani. I mean, his whole life story changed in the last year. Cancer! His wife splits! A new broad shows up! He drops out of the Senate race! He goes walking with the new broad, along with a bunch of photographers, and he doesn’t even realize he looks like a fucking idiot. Then they make his father for a hoodlum in the thirties! Doing time. Breaking heads. Stuff from sixty fucking years ago! Fact is, you weren’t doing time in the thirties, you were some kind of pussy, man. I want to go across the street to City Hall, see Giuliani, put an arm around him, and say, Come on, Rudy, LET’S GO GET A BLOW JOB!!”

At that point, Millie arrives with the eggs and bacon.

“Whad you say?” she says, pulling the plates closer to her ample breasts, as if holding them hostage.

“Aw, gee, Millie, sorry, pardon my French, man.”

“Don’t call me ‘man,’ Healey. I’m a girl.”

“Of course, man.”

She puts down the plates and wrinkles her brow, staring at Healey.

“What were you talking about, anyway?”

“The mayor, of course. I’m telling this Irish hoople I’m feeling sorry for the mayor these days—”

“Careful, he’ll have ya indicted.”

“And I was saying how I’d like to just put my arms around him, I swear…” Here his voice cracks into a counterfeit sob. “And just say to him, RUDY, LET’S GO GET A BLOW JOB!”

The coffee shop goes dead silent. Millie looks at Healey for a second and then laughs out loud and whacks Healey’s hat with her hand, sending it flying toward the kitchen.

“You’re RIGHT!” she says. “You’re absolutely RIGHT! That’s what he NEEDS!”

“I mean, can’t you see it?”

“I don’t wanna see it.”

“I mean—”

“Good-bye, Healey!”

She walks briskly away. Two other waitresses are giggling, and when Millie reaches them, she starts telling the story. The coffee shop is again filled with the sound of murmuring voices and clattering china. Cormac sees the waitresses in dumbshow.

“You ever notice,” Healey says, “that Millie’s got a beautiful ass?” “A BLOW JOB!”

Millie’s voice.

Reaching the punch line.

Healey’s eyes widen.

“PUT IT ON MY CHECK!” he instantly bellows down the full length of the coffee shop.

Shouts. Applause. Fists pounding on counters.

Cormac doesn’t care if Healey ever writes another word.

91.

The telephone keeps her present in his life as he waits for their night at the theater. Sometimes they speak twice in a day, at noon and at night. She talks about how she hates working at the drugstore, and he says she must find another job where she can use her brains, just look in the Times and go for the interviews and fill out the forms. She says she has no references, except Rite Aid. He says just be straight. Tell them you were raising a baby. Silence for a beat. Then more talk about where she’d want to work and how she could use Spanish and how bilingual secretaries are in demand. Then she tells him she is taking a day off from Rite Aid to apply for three jobs. One in a bank on Forty-eighth Street. Another at a dotcom outfit on Greene Street. Another in a law firm in the World Trade Center. He wishes her luck but says she should be careful about the dot-commers, there is a collapse under way.

“Hey,” she says, “are you what they call a mentor?”

On Saturday morning, she calls and her voice is bubbling and high-pitched.

“I got it,” she says. “I got the job! The one at the World Trade Center! An outfit named Reynoso and Ryan—they hired me. I got home last night and the message was on my machine and… I start Monday, can you believe it? Can you fucking believe it?”

She comes downtown and they celebrate in Chinatown at a place called Oriental Gardens on Elizabeth Street. They order leek soup and dim sum and rice with vegetables and separate mounds of cool shrimp and hot chicken. Her mood shifts from girlish excitement to nervousness to determination, each shift reflected in the way she uses her chopsticks. When Cormac can eat no more, she continues. Her eyes sparkle. Her breasts move under her black T-shirt. She is like a prisoner released from jail.

“Thank you, Cormac,” she says, and reaches across the table and squeezes his right hand. “If it wasn’t for you…”

“Stop,” he says. “This is all you. You did it. I didn’t.”

She sips green tea. He wants to ask her to come home with him, to plunge with him into the dark nest of Duane Street. To begin. She senses this too. But then glances at her wristwatch.

“I’d better run,” she says. “I’ve got to buy some clothes. Or at least clothes for Monday morning.”

She asks the waiter to wrap what is left of the food. He pays the bill with cash. They go out together into bright sunshine. They walk together toward Canal Street, passing the old police station marked 1881. The year of the gunfight at the OK Corral and the year Henry James published Portrait of a Lady. He thinks: What a marvelous country.

“I’ll see you at the theater,” she says, getting into a taxi. “And Cormac? Thanks again.”

92.

Cormac waits for Delfina under the marquee of the Royale Theater on West Forty-fifth Street, searching the crowds for her face. The wind off the river is raw for May, and there are gusts of rain driving most people into the shallow lobby or directly to their seats. Cormac wonders how many times he has walked under this marquee since the theater opened on New Year’s Day in 1927. He was at the opening, sent there by a features editor from the Daily News. The architect’s name was Krapp. Herbert J. Krapp. “I got a real crappy assignment for you,” the editor said. “Irresistible.” And off Cormac went. He remembers the name of the architect but can’t retrieve the name of the play. The theater was handsome and the street was busy all night with theater people and whiskey joints, and if you stayed up late enough and watched the entrances to the speakeasies, you might even get to see Babe Ruth.

For three months that year of Ruth’s sixty glorious home runs, Cormac had a secret affair with a glorious dancer named Ginger Everett. She was in an Earl Carroll show up the block toward Times Square, and he met her under this marquee where she was sheltering from a rainstorm. She had the Jean Harlow white-blond look before anyone ever heard of Jean Harlow, and like most dancers in those days she was short and a bit chubby, with a bosom that moved when she did, which was most of the time. Ginger Everett seemed to move when she was sitting down. Or sleeping.

She had come to New York on a train from Lorain, Ohio, in 1926, seventeen years old, brown-haired and zaftig and desperate to be a star, and somehow found her way to the arms of a bootlegger named Sonny Rivington. He made her a blonde and found her a gig in a chorus line and a suite at the Dixie Hotel. His suite. Cormac had seen him around the speakeasies: a small dapper man with shiny black hair combed straight back in the Valentino style. His face was so closely shaved that it glistened. He had eyes like a rattlesnake’s.

Sonny Rivington was only about twenty-five but seemed older than the other bootleggers, except when he was dancing. He loved to dance. And watching him from the bar or a corner table, Cormac was always envious. Sonny could do the Charleston without looking ridiculous. He was the best tango dancer in town until George Raft showed up. And every night after the show, he and Ginger Everett bounced from speak to speak. Dancing and drinking and dancing some more, until she could barely move. In the Rivington suite at the Dixie Hotel, she would usually go right to sleep. Poor Sonny: Though his eyes were as old as the lairs of rattlesnakes, he was still too young to know that dancers work so hard at night they can only make love in the morning. This annoyed him, because he never woke up until noon and therefore had no mornings. So he threw her out. She came back. He gave up on her a week later. They got back together. But Cormac’s mornings were always free, and sometimes before noon, she would slip away for a late breakfast in his studio, racing downtown on the subway, and make love to him as if working out in a gym. He was certain that the thing about him she most admired was that he could not dance. One other thing was absolutely clear: She was never in love with Cormac Samuel O’Connor. She was mad for Sonny Rivington.

Finally, one night in 1928 (around the time Mae West was doing Diamond Lil at the Royale, a show he does not remember), Cormac was sitting at the bar in Billy LaHiff’s saloon when Sonny and Ginger came in together. She glanced at Cormac in a nervous way, but then Sonny Rivington started hauling her around the dance floor. She left after two lindy hops to go to the ladies’ room, probably to steal five minutes’ sleep standing up. Then two gunsels walked in wearing gray hats and black overcoats, went straight to Sonny’s table, shot him twelve times, and walked out. In the uproar, Cormac went to the ladies’ room and told Ginger Everett to get the hell out of there, and she dashed out the back door, while he called in the details to the Daily News city desk without mentioning her. She showed up at his studio three hours later, cried for five minutes for poor Sonny Rivington, and then slept for eighteen hours. Two days later she left by train for Hollywood, where she got two small parts in Harold Lloyd movies, married a real estate operator, and disappeared forever.

Now on this street where Cormac met Ginger Everett on a rainy night while Sonny was out of town, here comes Delfina Cintron. Head down, raincoat collar high, cheeks rouged by the wind. She sees him, whispers a hello, takes his arm, and they go in to see Copenhagen. A few men turn to look at her. She removes her coat as they find the seats. She’s wearing a low-cut black sheath and a string of fake pearls and matching fake-pearl earrings and she glows with golden beauty. The houselights dim. She folds her coat over her knees with the Playbill on top. She takes Cormac’s rain-chilled hand. Her own hand is very warm.

“I’m so excited,” she says. “A play! A Broadway play.”

As they watch the first act, he hears her make several gasping sounds. Her hand gets wet and she removes it in an embarrassed way and tamps it dry on her coat. He glances at her. Her face is totally concentrated on this drama about the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and the morality of using their science to build an atomic bomb. The writing, by Michael Frayn, is excellent, but Cormac can’t follow the technical language and imagines Mae West walking in from stage right and causing a riot. At the interval, the lights come up and Delfina’s eyes are welling with tears.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know.” They stand to let others pass to the aisle. “I’ll explain later. Do we have time for a smoke?”

The area in front of the theater is packed. Delfina is composed now, coat draped over her shoulders, and they each smoke Marlboro Lights.

“You see, at Hunter, I had this physics class, and—”

Lights begin blinking, ordering them to return to the seats. She stamps out the cigarette.

“We’ll talk later.”

In the dark, she disappears into the play, or into memory, or both. The rest of the audience seems as absorbed as Delfina Cintron. In the last days of the giddy boom, they are actually paying attention to a moral dilemma. At the end, he and Delfina join in the standing ovation and then move slowly back up the aisle toward the street.

“Thank you so much, Cormac,” she says. “That was—it meant a lot to me.”

He tries not to sound like a stiff but does anyway: “I’m just glad you could come with me.”

The lame sentence goes past her. She says: “I could feel things popping in my brain. You know? Like tiny little dead things suddenly coming to life. It was like—if you didn’t use certain muscles for a long time? Then you do, and pop-pop-pop.”

They walk out into the cool street. The rain has stopped. They hurry toward Frankie & Johnny’s on Forty-fourth Street off Eighth Avenue. One flight up. Delfina has never been here before, but Cormac remembers a night when Owney Madden threw a police lieutenant down the stairs for trying to double the payoffs. He and Delfina go up the same flight of stairs, and he’s at eye level with her golden thighs, and now he remembers Madden’s enraged gangster face. The restaurant is filling up with the New Jersey people coming out of the theaters. They check their coats. Men look up when Delfina walks in her street swagger behind a waiter to a table against the wall, with Cormac behind her. She sits down, scraping the chair as she pulls it forward. She wants a glass of wine and Cormac orders a glass of the house red and a large bottle of sparkling water. She lifts the menu.

“Steak,” she says, grinding her jaws in an exaggerated way. “Steak, steak, steak.”

“I guess you want steak.”

“With cottage fries and tomatoes and onions and then some amazing dessert.”

“I’ll have the same,” Cormac says. “I can walk it off tomorrow.”

She looks at him in an amused way, as if she has other ideas about working off the calories. The waiter arrives with the wine. Cormac orders. Every table is now full and there are people standing near the door.

“What a great place this is,” she says.

“Used to be a speakeasy.”

“A what?”

He has forgotten how young she is, and explains about Prohibition and what speakeasies were and how the modern Mob was invented in places like this. She finds the notion of Prohibition hard to understand.

“You mean they banned all drinking? Like with drugs today?”

“Yes, and with the same kind of success.”

“Holy shit.”

“That’s what New York said too.”

They touch glasses, and she sips, then twirls the glass by the stem.

“That’s good.” Her tongue passing over her upper lip. “Here’s to the end of Prohibition.”

She glances around, her brow furrowing. A chill washes over her.

“Listen,” she says, “I’m sorry I got so upset back there in the theater.”

“What was that all about?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Sure you do.”

“Yeah. I do.”

A pause. The diners are murmuring, laughing, leafing through Playbills for the names of actors.

“It just, I mean, the whole thing, the play, the subject, it just reminded me of what I threw away,” she says. “At Hunter, I was a whiz at physics. I don’t know why. It sure didn’t come from genes. I just got it from the beginning, it was a kind of center of things for me. And the professor knew I got it. He paid me a lot of attention. Too much attention. I was just a kid, eighteen. But I guess he never had a Latina in his class who got it the way I got it. Physics was for Jewish kids or Chinese kids or Korean kids. Not for kids from the D.R. But I got it. And I thought, Hey, maybe I’ll major in this, keep learning, keep growing, go to graduate school, MIT or Cal-Tech, discover some new principle, the way Bohr did and Heisenberg did. I knew about these guys, from my teacher. Shit, I had a photograph of Einstein on the wall of my room in Queens. You know, the one where he’s sticking out his tongue? You know that one?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I guess you knew this was coming, right? I got involved with the professor. It’s such a cliché. Student Falls for Professor. Puh-leeze. But, anyway, I did. By then I was nineteen. He was forty-two. And married. Hey: Are you married?”

“No.”

“But you’ve been married?”

“Yes.”

“So you know it’s never easy, I guess. Not for anybody.” A pause. “Anyway, I came on to him just before the end of the term. I didn’t have a plan or anything. I just felt, hey, I’ve got to have him. The details don’t matter. We saw each other all that summer. He rented a house on the Jersey shore for his wife and two kids and went down after class on Friday and came back Sunday night. Sometimes he had to take his boy to Yankee Stadium, or the Planetarium, or something, but the rest of the time we were together. He kept teaching me about physics, making my head explode, and he did his best in bed. Until finally his wife caught on. She made him choose. And he chose her, okay?” She sips the rest of her wine. “Oh, well, fuck it. Fuck him. Too.”

“Did he kill physics for you?”

The salads arrive. She eats and talks.

“No. I went back in the fall and took courses with another professor. One that my guy recommended, a nice old Austrian. And in a way, the Austrian helped me get over my guy, just by challenging me to be better, to go deeper and deeper. I finished my course with him. He told me in that Austrian accent that I had a great future. And then I threw it away.”

Another pause. Cormac waits.

“I just felt, this is all wrong. I’m in a world where I don’t belong. It’s only gonna hurt me. I’ve gotta get out. What did I think I was, anyway? That’s what they always ask in the street. What did I think I was, white? Ghetto bullshit always wins. I walked away. I found my man, had my baby, all that sad song I already told you.” She looks up and smiles in a wounded way. “When I met you, I was the only cashier in the history of Rite Aid who understood quantum theory.”

“Can you use it in the new job?”

“No, it’s a law firm, import-export, NAFTA, all that. My Spanish helps with calls to Monterrey.” She grins. “But the guys there are pretty good guys. Reynoso is a Mexican who came here in 1968, after all his friends were shot in some massacre. He went to Columbia, gave up Marx, became a business major, then took a law degree. He can be very funny.”

“What about Ryan?”

“I don’t even know if he exists,” she says. “He’s always off in Europe or someplace, making deals. Or that’s what Reynoso says.”

She smiles in a pleased way, all regret about physics now vanished. The salad plates are carried away by a Mexican busboy (“Mil gracias, joven,” she says); the steak arrives. She seems grateful for the interruption and begins slicing meat.

“Oh, wow—this is good.”

She glances around the room, and then giggles.

“Why do I feel like I’m in New Jersey?”

“Because New Jersey is here at all these other tables?”

“What do you think their lives are like?” she says. Cormac can’t tell her that since the night he washed up on its shores after killing the Earl of Warren, he has never been in New Jersey.

“Nasty, brutish, and long.”

She smiles, chews, swallows. He realizes she hasn’t used “fuck” all evening long. The noise of the diners is rising.

“So, anyway, that’s why I was upset.”

“You don’t look upset now.”

“I’m not.”

She looks directly at Cormac, her eyes lustrous and black in the restaurant’s yellow light.

“You’re a nice man.”

“You’re a good woman.”

“Not so good.”

“And I’m not so nice.”

Her face darkens in an embarrassed way and she twirls the glass toward the waiter. He comes and takes it away. The steak is gone. She looks sated. Then starts to get up, murmuring about the ladies’ room.

“Go to the front door,” Cormac explains. “Make a left, then down the short flight of stairs.”

“All that to get to the ladies’ room?”

“It used to be a speakeasy, Delfina. They never changed the layout.”

She gets up and walks through the crowded dining room. Older women look at older men who are looking at Delfina. Then turn to look at her themselves. Cormac remembers Ginger Everett turning heads in this room and singing “Bluebird of Happiness” for the crowd in a thin little voice; but Ginger never came close to weeping over quantum physics. When Delfina makes her return (the table cleared of plates, a fresh wine waiting), a lot of eyes fall upon Cormac too. His eyes are on Delfina’s belly, under the black sheath. He rises and makes an effort at moving her chair, but she’s too quick.

“You were staring at my belly,” she says, leaning forward with elbows on the table.

“I want to see what’s there.”

She glances behind her to see if she can be heard. She can’t. “First I want some chocolate cake.”

The waiter comes over. Cormac orders two coffees, one chocolate cake, and two forks. The waiter glides away. Then, on the far side of the room, a woman starts shouting at a man. She’s about fifty, with blue-rinsed hair and real pearl earrings. She’s a little drunk, and at first her words are indistinct in the general din of the restaurant. Then the room hushes, and they can hear what she’s shouting at the large white-haired man across the table from her. He starts patiently wiping his eyeglasses with a handkerchief.

“Go over and talk to her, Harry, why don’t yuh?” the woman shouts. “Just go over and tell her you want to fuck her, Harry, why don’t yuh?”

Delfina’s face shifts. There’s a flicker of a smile and then a tense freezing of her features as she realizes the woman is talking about her. Other diners look at the woman, then at Delfina.

“Go over, Harry, offer her money. Isn’t that what you ushally do? How much to look at a tit, Harry? Five hundred? Is that your ushual rate? And her snatch? How much for that, Harry? Five grand? Go ahead, ask her.”

Three waiters surround the table, blocking the woman and her man, Harry.

“Jesus Christ…” Delfina says darkly. “It’s always the same old shit.”

They hear the high-pitched voice from behind the fence of waiters. Cormac glimpses Harry fumbling for cash. “Go ahead, Harry, she’d prob’ly love it, you old fool.”

“Hey,” a beefy man shouts. “Pipe down, willya? I’m tryin’ ta eat!” A dozen other diners applaud.

“Eat shit!” the woman yells at all of them. “Eat shit and die!”

Harry gets up now. He’s very large, very old, and very embarrassed. The waiters are trying to move the woman gently toward the door. She now looks about seventy.

“What is this?” she yells. “The bum’s rush? When Meyer was alive, you wooden dare pull this shit.”

Other diners now try to look normal. Then Harry moves through the diners to the table where Delfina seems to be shrinking and Cormac is preparing for an assault. The old man bows in a stiff, old-hoodlum way. Cormac relaxes.

“Folks,” Harry says, “I’d like to apologize to yiz, bot’ of yiz. My wife is def’nitely out of order. She’s a little cuckoo.”

He turns and moves toward the door, where the waiters are draping a coat on his wife’s shoulders. The murmur of the room returns in a relieved way.

“Just another romantic dinner in the Big Apple,” Cormac says.

“Yeah.” Delfina chews the inside of her mouth. “Let’s skip the cake and coffee.”

She still seems mortified. Other diners continue glancing at her, as much to see her reaction as to judge the provocation for another woman’s rage. She squirms in her seat. Cormac realizes that the only other Latinos in the room are the busboys.

“There was a time,” Delfina whispers, “when I used to wish I was flat-assed and flat-chested. Just so I wouldn’t be bothered so much. Then I realized T and A gave me some kind of power over men. Then it became a bother again. Like tonight. Sometimes I wish I was a hundred years old and everything like that was behind me.”

Suddenly the waiter is there with the cake and the coffee, and a half smile on his face.

“Sorry about all that,” he says. “She gets stewed on two high-balls, that one. She doesn’t want to know Meyer is dead, and she’s old. Dessert is on the house.”

He hurries away. Delfina looks at the cake, then at Cormac, smiles, and lifts a fork.

“What the hell, Cormac! We earned it.”

They attack the cake in a fever of release, and Cormac struggles to imagine her at Hunter, lost in the abstractions of physics, a place where she didn’t have to think about being thinner or smaller or less beautiful. She makes “um” sounds now as she eats the cake. Um. Um-um. Um. Women ate this way after escaping from the Five Points too.

“By the way,” she says, “who is Meyer?”

“His last name was Lansky and he was the smartest gangster who ever lived. I’ll tell you all about him one of these days.”

“Not tonight?” she says, the tip of her tongue flicking chocolate off her upper lip.

“No,” Cormac says. “Not tonight.”

93.

She steps into the bright darkness of the Studio and gazes at the skylight. She makes the same small gasping sound he heard in the theater. She moves forward and stands very still. Looking through the panes of the skylight.

“Up there,” she says. “Way up there? The eighty-fourth floor? That’s my office.”

She looks amazed.

“I can see you from there,” she says, and turns to him. Her teeth are very white, her skin receding into the obscure light. “Anyway, I can see your roof.”

She looks up at him, and he puts a hand on her waist, and she eases into him like a partner in a slow dance. Slowly, he kisses her brow, her cheek, her lips. Her breasts are hard against his chest. He can feel her belly pressing against his own. He inhales the soapy smell of her wiry African hair.

In the dark bedroom, a floor below the Studio, they lie together for a long while, her body pressed against his, her head on his chest. Her breathing slows into comfort, and his follows. She is wordless, and he feels that speaking would be an intrusion. He hears the ticking of a clock that sounds like the drip of a water tap. Away off, the city murmurs through the thick drapes. Finally she rises on one elbow and gazes at him, holding the sheet to her body.

“Who are you, anyway?” she says.

“I was thinking the same thing about you.”

She giggles, then sits up, Cormac thinking: Don’t go, not yet.

“Where’s the john?” she says.

She demands the tour and he gives it to her, the two of them barefoot in terry-cloth bathrobes, Cormac flicking on lamps as they pad across scattered rugs and polished plank. She looks smaller now, without shoes, engulfed by the robe. She examines the first floor as if it were a museum, her eyes moving over the long rows of tall bookshelves, the paintings, the African masks, the yellow vellum lampshades and Moroccan rugs. He hopes she doesn’t say Have you read all these books? She doesn’t. Her feet splay on the hardwood floors as she touches the polished top of the dining table, the brocaded Mexican fabrics of the chairs, the silver candelabra. They can both hear rain now spattering the four windows on the Duane Street end, the second stage of an early storm, coming in hard off the harbor. She stops to examine herself in a large white-and-gold mirror, a hand going to her rain-exploded hair, which now looks like a black wiry halo. He stands behind her, his own flesh pale beside her. He wraps his arms around her and then fumbles with the knot of the robe until it opens.

He sees his own pale hand gently holding a dark-skinned breast, and her head leaning back into him, lips parted, and his hand moving down to her belly.

To the twin spirals.

They are there. Traced lightly, delicately on her skin, facing each other like enraptured sea serpents.

His heart bumps and bumps and he is sure she must hear it and feel it. They are here: She is the dark lady with the spirals. His fingertips trace their outlines, their wide bottoms vanishing into the thick black vee of her pubic hair. She pushes back into him, and must feel his hardening.

“Are they disgusting to you?” she says.

“They’re beautiful,” he says.

“Hold me tight,” she says.

Later, rising from the floor, she tightens the robe and walks to the kitchen. He is relieved: She doesn’t review her own performance. Or his. She opens the refrigerator, which holds a bowl of fresh green grapes and some oranges, picks a crisp grape, munches it, grabs a handful, then takes a bottle of water and closes the door. She finishes the grapes, takes an amused swig from the bottle, sloshes the water in her mouth, swallows. Then she moves slightly to her left, peering down the corridor like a cat who has arrived in a new place: alert, poised, wary of danger.

“This is beautiful,” she says.

“It’s comfortable,” Cormac says, sounding to himself like a real estate salesman. “I like being here.”

She looks directly at him, her eyes liquid. “Me too.”

He leads her up the stairs again to the Studio, to the view of the Woolworth Building and the Twin Towers, all misty in rain. He opens the small refrigerator and she takes an icy bottle of Evian and hands it to him. Now she sees the desk, the computer, the television set, the CD player. The door to the Archive is closed. As is the door to the bathroom and the jacuzzi. Cormac thinks: I could paint you just like this, in that terry-cloth robe.

“I never met anyone rich before,” she says, and giggles.

“I’m not rich.”

“Come on: A place like this costs a mint.”

“Not when I got it,” he says. “It was just a dump then.”

Hoping she doesn’t ask what year. Hoping she doesn’t ask where he got the money. She doesn’t. She leans back against a bookcase full of large volumes on Mexico and Italy and other places he has never seen. She takes another gulp of water. For a long silent moment, he can feel her staring at him, can feel shapeless questions traveling in the air between them. Cormac thinks: If she asks, I might even answer.

And then to himself, and to her, he says, “I’m alive.”

That night he dreams of swimming in a vast sea, his body making wide spirals in the water, curving, turning, the forms remaining in his wake. When he finishes cutting spirals with his body, they glow against the dark waters. Something comes from beneath him, bumping, pushing him.

He awakes in sweat and tears.

The clock tells him that it’s 8:48. She’s gone into the gray morning. He is not surprised. He is, in fact, relieved. There is nothing more clumsy than the talk on the morning after the first night before. He turns in the bed, inhaling the mixed scents of her body. He pulls a pillow close to his chest. He hears church bells ringing beyond the drapes.

He walks south on Broadway in the Sunday-morning quiet, passing shuttered stores and tourists with unfolded maps and white shoes. At the Battery, he goes to the final iron railing, where he can hear the languid slapping of the sea. Images of Delfina move through him. A warm breeze brings him the salt of the harbor. He watches a Nigerian tanker heading for the open sea. A squadron of gulls wheels above the tanker, completes a swift reconnaissance, and angles away toward Governor’s Island.

They are there, Cormac thinks. The spirals are there. I’ve traced them with my tongue.

His heart quickens and he turns from the harbor and walks toward South Street, where he can sit at a breakfast table and see the masts of a sailing ship.

94.

She calls him about six. She is shy at first, holding back, uttering banalities, talking around what happened between them. Then he hears her inhaling a cigarette. She is abruptly more direct.

“My tattoos didn��t disgust you?” she says.

“Not at all. They’re kind of beautiful.”

She laughs. “Kind of.”

“Like sea serpents. Or snakes in a Hindu temple.”

“I’ve never seen a sea serpent. Or a Hindu temple.”

“Neither have I. But I’ve got a book down the hall—”

“I want you to show it to me. Soon.”

“Soon.”

She pauses, and her voice flattens.

“I got them to make myself disgusting.”

Cormac says nothing.

“I wanted to scare men away,” she says, taking a deep drag, exhaling slowly. “I’d fucked too many of them and didn’t want to fuck another. And I thought, Shit, even if I want to give in, you know, some night with too much to drink, or too filled up with loneliness, or anger, or hatred, I thought, If I can scare them with something, their cocks will die.” She likes using the hard, blunt Anglo-Saxon words, talking “street,” letting Cormac know which version of Delfina Cintron is now talking. “It was like wearing a sign that said, ‘Beware of the cunt.’ ”

Cormac wants to laugh, but doesn’t. In her way, she’s letting him know that she will take sex when she chooses to have it, but she will not be hurt. He listens to the words beyond the hardness.

“Who did them for you?” he asks.

“Some guy uptown,” she says. “Way uptown. Like on the top of the island. I can’t even remember his name. Black dude. Blacker than any black man I ever saw, talks in some African accent? Like the guys peddle incense around Bloomingdale’s? One of those guys. Maybe sixty years old. Maybe older.”

Cormac imagines the face of the tattoo artist. The face of Kongo. His skin tingles.

“Did he have a set of designs?”

“Yeah, the usual stuff. You know, Malcolm X, and words in Chinese, crosses, stars, skulls, the stuff these goddamned basketball players wear all over themselves like graffiti.”

“And yours?”

“He just sketched it on paper,” she says. He knows her hand is moving in air, making a sketch. “It looked simple and scary at the same time. It was me that told him to make it go all the way down to my bush.” She chuckles sadly. “I had to go to him four times, he called them four treatments, like he was a doctor, a million little needles. He did half of one, you know, looped around my belly button, and it hurt so much I wanted to give up, and then thought, Shit, this will look ridiculous all by itself, like shaving half your head. So I had him finish the job. To get the bottoms where I wanted them, I had to shave. In a way, that turned me on, but it didn’t do anything for the old man. Between the tattoo and the shave, I itched for a month.”

She laughs.

“They sure didn’t work with you,” she says, almost solemnly. “I mean, didn’t scare you off.” A pause. “I’m glad.” A longer pause. “Until last night, I hadn’t fucked anyone in almost two years.”

95.

At dusk, he takes the bike for his Wordsworth. He pedals up the West Side and turns right into Soho, heading for Crosby Street to avoid the Sunday tourists on Broadway. He will see Delfina on Wednesday. He will cook. She will pose for his charcoaled hand. He does not try to imagine that night. He pedals across the immediate space in front of him. It’s dark when he reaches Houston Street, and he wonders where all the black bicycle riders went. One summer, they were all gone, never to be seen again. He did not again see the man who answered his Yoruba with Ashanti.

But he knows that other figures and things and odors are gone too. The shopping-bag ladies were everywhere for six years, pushing their packed supermarket wagons into frozen doorways, talking steadily in streams of scrambled nouns, sorting through tiny bags of socks or knitting needles or empty envelopes; and then they were gone. To shelters or asylums or the Potter’s Field on Hart Island. There were jugglers on certain corners, drawing crowds on summer nights, their faces familiar for a dozen years, and then they were gone too. One year, there were no more cooking odors from the tenements of the Lower East Side, and no more clotheslines on the rooftops or in the backyards. The familiar city vanished; the new city emerged; and in each new city, Cormac was new too.

He moves now into what he once knew as Kleindeutschland, where Germans were everywhere, and he worked for a year setting type at a German newspaper. Most of the older Germans were the children of those who left in 1848 and the relatives who kept coming after the first wave settled: socialists and engineers and mechanics and doctors, all of them creating their own version of America, making deals with Tammany, using the system that they didn’t invent while trying to make it more orderly. They too had started in the Five Points, but kept moving north and east until they had forged a neighborhood that most were certain would last forever. Little Germany.

Right there on Stanton Street, where the Quisqueya la Bella bodega now offers fresh mango and papaya, was the saloon of Peter Reuter. All the newspapermen went in the evening to drink there after the edition was locked up. Writers, reporters, men still smelling of melted lead from the composing room; and here too came the poets and painters and mad architects, the inflamed or disillusioned socialists, the anarchists and syndicalists, to drink lager or ale, to consume great barrels of sausage, and to sing the old songs at midnight. That’s where he went on the night in 1904 after writing his story for the Sun about the burning of the General Slocum. Nobody remembered it anymore, but the sinking of the General Slocum in the East River was the worst disaster in New York history. Everybody on board was heading for an annual excursion to Long Island. All Germans, most out of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, many of them children. A fire started, then exploded, then the ship was burning and moving, the fire hoses rotted, the women and children diving away from the fire into the June waters, unable to swim, and then the ship sank in the violent waters of Hell Gate. More than a thousand died, and the funerals went on for a week and when it was over the Germans all left Kleindeutschland. They went to Yorkville and tried to forget, and the Jews from Central Europe moved in and started the legend of the Lower East Side. That night in Peter Reuter’s saloon, with death throbbing in the streets around him, Cormac couldn’t wipe the horror from his mind, not even when he slept with a blowsy red-haired woman from Bavaria.

Now Cormac pauses on the corner. In Tompkins Square Park, there’s a monument to the victims of the General Slocum, but nobody in the neighborhood knows what it’s commemorating. Now merengue music plays from an unseen radio. Now, on stoops and on sidewalks, kids strut and pose and curse. He hears Delfina’s voice: Same old ghetto bullshit.

The telephone rings around midnight. Cormac picks it up, drops his voice, thinking it’s Delfina, whispers hello.

“How seductive… ARE YOU AWAKE?”

Healey.

“I am now.”

“I just opened the MAIL ten days late. And there’s an INVITE to the Metropolitan Museum. Tomorrow night. Some kind of a NEW YORK ART SHOW! And all the biggies, the MIGHTY ASSHOLES OF THE PLANET, will be there. Go with me. It should be a million LAUGHS.”

“What time?” “Seven-THIRTY!”

“I’ll see you on the steps.”

96.

Cormac comes up out of the Lexington Avenue subway at Eighty-sixth Street and walks west toward the park into a dazzle of silver light. The sidewalk is like pewter, tarnished only by the shadows of men and women whose faces are obscured and formless. The sun is behind them. There are silvery reflections on windows, and the upper stories of apartment houses are drained of color by the light. He came here one afternoon long ago in a carriage drawn by two horses, sitting beside Bill Tweed. There were a few rutted dirt roads then and some stands of trees and much scrub. In his wheezy baritone Bill Tweed spoke with excitement about what was coming: streets and apartment houses and a great green park and perhaps even a museum for the city of New York. “It will change before we’re buried,” he said, and laughed. “There won’t be a live rabbit left on the island.” As on so many other things, the Boss was right. He just didn’t live to see it happen.

There’s a milling crowd on the steps of the Metropolitan, made of tourists and visitors from New Jersey and a slew of photographers dressed in formal wear. A huge banner proclaims the name of the show: Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, and Cormac smiles. Thinking: I’m the only person here who actually lived in that lost city. The photographers stand in a tuxedoed pack at the foot of the stairs, waiting for the heavy doors of arriving limousines to open and for their inhabitants to emerge into the sheet lightning of electronic flash. As he climbs the broad stairs on the far right, dressed in his twenty-seven-year-old tuxedo and wearing his fake plain-glass spectacles, his patent-leather shoes glistening and his hair brushed straight back, Cormac can see Madonna getting out of a stretch limo as if she had arrived at the Academy Awards. Ordinary singer, fair dancer, but a marvelous act. Ahead of him, Healey is standing with some tourists just short of the top step. His tuxedo looks thirty-two years old. He hands Cormac a ticket.

“You see, failure is a fucking COMFORT, pal,” Healey says, waving a huge hand at the crowd and gesturing toward poor Madonna and the engulfing photographers. A few people back away from Healey’s bulky loudness. In the excited din, Cormac hears scraps of French and German. “You’re a certified failure, nobody blinds you with those goddamned FLASHBULBS! Nobody asks you to spell your fucking NAME! Nobody asks you whether you like the show, even if you haven’t SEEN IT! They don’t give a shit. You’re a nobody. They don’t care if you LIVE OR DIE.”

More photographers are inside the main hall, and a few reporters scribbling notes, and several hundred people in what used to be called evening wear. There’s another eruption of flashbulbs as Madonna comes into the museum, smiling broadly, dressed modestly, moving past Cormac and Healey in the direction of the galleries, and then behind her comes Lauren Bacall. She looks at them through hooded eyes and smiles.

“Healey, you big ape,” she says with a growl. “Where’s that play you promised me twenty years ago?”

“It’s coming, Betty, it’s ALMOST DONE! I swear to Yahweh!” She laughs and gives him a shove and keeps moving. At these rituals, celebrities have one basic tactic: smile and keep moving. A young woman photographer confronts Healey with a notebook in hand.

“Excuse me, sir,” she says. “Can you tell me your name?”

“I don’t HAVE a name! I’m a nobody.”

“Come on, man—”

Then more white lights explode and the photographer turns away and the rumbling crowd sounds grow louder, with several hundred voices bouncing off glazed marble. Walking in the door are the people Cormac has come to see: William Hancock Warren and his wife, Elizabeth. Warren’s tuxedo is rumpled and he needs a haircut and keeps brushing at his hair while chatting amiably with the reporters. As he listens to a question, the mouth moves into an amused smile. From where Cormac is standing on the fringe of the crowd, he can’t hear a word. But Warren seems relaxed, holding Elizabeth’s hand lightly, and when he says something, the reporters smile too. He is charming them. His wife says nothing to anyone.

“This is hard to BELIEVE,” Healey says. “I mean, this isn’t Vladimir Putin, or Seamus Heaney, or PUFFY FUCKING COMBS! This is a real estate guy that owns a paper!”

“That’s why they like him,” Cormac says. “Especially the free-lancers. He could put them all on the payroll and never miss a meal.”

Then Warren turns toward another shower of flash and sees the mayor come in, police bodyguards behind him wearing dark blue suits and buttons in their ears. The mayor looks hunched and tired. But the mayor’s brain tells the mayor to smile. He smiles. His brain tells him to embrace Warren. He embraces Warren. The embrace is digitally immortalized by the photographers, though only Warren’s newspaper will ever consider running the picture. Elizabeth slips her hand out of her husband’s grip and backs away, a smile fixed on her face. A look of melancholy passes across her face, as if she has long ago grown weary of photographs.

“Shit, look who’s here,” Healey says, gesturing toward a small ruddy man with thinning white hair who has come in with a fat woman, right behind the mayor. “This butterball owes me MONEY!” The fat man is a literary agent named Brookner. Sometimes known as Legs, for the speed of his movements in the William Morris mailroom in the 1950s. He had enriched himself with 10 percent of some fabulous paydays, but now in the years of his wealth and respectability, when he even has a foundation named after himself and the wing of a mediumsized hospital in Sarasota, Legs Brookner insists on being called Irving.

“LEGS!” Healey bellows, and goes off in big-shouldered pursuit. Cormac watches Elizabeth Warren, who is chatting with an elderly woman while her husband and the mayor turn to embrace the arriving governor.

Cormac moves around casually, drawing Elizabeth Warren in his mind. She’s indeed a beauty of a classic English type. Smooth cream-colored skin. Lean, athletic body sheathed in a black Valentino frock. Oval head, with a well-defined jaw. Her dark burnt-sienna hair is pulled back tightly off the clean plane of her brow, and she wears a silver stud in the lobe of each small, slightly protruding ear. There’s a hint of blush on her high cheekbones. She has heavy eyebrows, widely spaced hazel eyes deepened by makeup, and her mouth is wide when she smiles. As Cormac drifts closer, he notices one crooked bicuspid among the otherwise perfect white teeth. All of this rests on a long regal neck, rising off narrow shoulders and emphasized by a silver necklace holding a single lustrous opal. Sargent might have used her as “Madame X.”

Then Warren and the mayor and the governor move forward, the mayor pointing at nothing to give the photographers a bit of fraudulent action, and Elizabeth moves too, smiling and shaking hands with the wife of the governor. Cormac hangs behind; the eyes of two sets of political bodyguards are now scanning him, along with other visitors. He sees the Warrens and the politicians merge with the crowd of several hundred people and tries to move in casually behind them, but they vanish into the blur of black tuxedos.

The glorious high-ceilinged room now smells of perfume, cologne, and money. They all move with practiced ease, shaking hands, embracing, the men smiling, the women offering cheeks to be kissed. Most of them are indifferent to the show-business celebrities among them. They won’t cross the room to meet Madonna. They won’t tell Steve Martin they admire his work. After all, a few of them own the companies that employ the performers. If the mayor says hello and remembers a name, they will chat with him. If he utters a mere hello, they will nod in a restrained way. He is now a lame duck, forced to leave office at the end of the year because of a law on term limits that he supported. His marriage is a public mess. His popularity ratings are dropping like a stone. He is on his way out, to be rewarded with the customary farewell present of all reasonably well known politicians: a Book Deal. The mayor is important but not that important.

The older guests know this event is just another New York ritual. The celebrities are there to draw the media, which in turn will draw paying customers to the museum. But most of them have contempt for the media too. Cormac has heard that contempt expressed for more than a century. In their view, the reporters and photographers know nothing about how things really work in New York. Fame isn’t the goal; power is. And power is forged over Armagnac and cigars. If any of these men employ public relations counsel, the flacks’ primary task is to keep names out of the newspapers.

Cormac sees some people he knows casually but edges away from them, the habit of a long life. Gazing with lust at the mayor, the governor, and Warren is a once-famous sixties hippie, friend of Jerry and Abbie and the Democratic Republic of the Lower East Side. Cormac used to see him at love-ins and beins and fund-raisers for the Weather Underground. Now his face is clean-shaven and pasty and he’s considered a genius at the deals that have driven the NASDAQ over the moon. “Concept,” he told Charlie Rose one night on channel 13. “Concept is everything.” Cormac thought at the time: Okay, give me five thousand dollars’ worth of symbolic logic. The man would almost certainly have answered, “Is that a derivative?” That was two years ago. On this night, as tech stocks keep tanking, the exhippie’s face looks ashen. Cormac wonders if he knows the dotcommer on the second floor at Duane Street, the fast-talking young man who this morning gave a month’s notice, due, he said, to the decline in the market. Cormac has seen the doomed, ashen look of the ex-hippie before, in 1893, in 1929. One morning, as the bad news becomes a flood, the blessed genius of money starts looking at the faces of strangers as if his brain has turned into an abacus. How much can you invest? How much can you loan me? How can you keep me from suicide?

Over on the side, looking like an enormous soft rock in his tuxedo, is a Cuban exile who burned with a mad fanaticism in the early 1960s. He took CIA money until 1971 and used it to fight Fidel Castro by buying lots in Bergen County while helping clumsy agents from Cali and Medellín peddle the marvelous white-powder exports of Colombia. Now he owns banks in New Jersey, Dade County, and Puerto Rico; controls a Spanish-language television network; has developed more than seven hundred acres along the Hudson below the Palisades; and recently turned down the American ambassadorship to Spain. Cormac has read in Art News that he owns four Frida Kahlos, six Wilfredo Lams, three Picassos, and sixteen Boteros. Two directors of the museum hover near him as if expecting his collection to come to them in a massive bequest in the event of a massive coronary. The Cuban’s large gorged face pulses so vividly that the process could begin at any moment.

Some guests have planted their feet and refuse to move, waiting to be approached by potential partners, political fund-raisers, or aspiring acolytes now available after the dot-com collapse. Others work the room in a restrained way, trying to avoid the unforgivable New York sin of vulgarity, clearly envious of the faded Wasps who have been trained for ten generations to avoid sweating, belching, and farting. Some wear expensive rugs. Some tamp with handkerchiefs at sweaty upper lips. Others perform affection toward their wives, touching their hands as if petting cats. Cormac has lost sight of Healey but assumes he’s all right, gleefully impaling Legs Brookner on a lance in the medieval armor room.

The sound of the event grows louder, amplified by more marble and stone, nouns and verbs caroming off the walls, the stony rumble of blunt consonants punctuated by trills of female laughter. Searching for the Warrens, Cormac sees a few middle-aged men, recent transplants from Kabul or Karachi, who have the feral eyes of those distant ancestors who perched with rifles in mountain passes, awaiting human prey. There are a number of black couples, looking delighted to be here, and a larger number of Asians than is usual at such affairs. The diplomats are present too, invited from the consulates and the United Nations, a few up from Washington for the evening, several of them alone, others clutching wives twenty years their juniors, acquired on some distant posting: a Norwegian with a Mexican wife, a Mexican with a French wife, a Frenchman with an Israeli wife, and none with American wives. Their eyes shift, dart, stare, drift, trying to read the room and its crowd; they look at everything but the art.

Coolest of all are the people of semi-old money, those hard, intelligent men who shoved the old-moneyed Wasps out of real estate and banks and brokerage houses. These are children of the old immigrants, the Jews and Irish and Italians, men shaped by the Depression and the infantry, veterans of the Hürtgen Forest or Anzio or Iwo Jima, finally freed from the receding European past of their parents by combat and the G.I. Bill. They spent twenty years outworking, outthinking the Old Money, vowing in some private way that nobody in their family line would ever be poor again. Cormac likes them very much. They have gone through life without kissing a single ass. They are old now, tennis fit and golf tan, discreet and restrained, and tougher than steel. Their sons and grandsons try playing tough. They shout at waiters. They rail at employees. They sneer at politicians. They curse the business journalists. But (Cormac thinks) all of the children combined are not as tough as one of these men who came home in 1946 with bupkis in their pockets and changed New York forever.

Cormac can’t see Warren, or the mayor or the governor. They must be chatting in a private room. He separates himself from the crowd and drifts into the galleries to look at the remnants of the world where he once lived. There are only six or seven people walking quietly in the first room, glancing at an old print here, a varnished portrait of some stern Protestant there, a crude map. They bow to squint at the explanatory captions. An African-American couple, perfectly groomed, living well-defended lives, gaze together at one lithograph that includes black street musicians and white revelers. Cormac hopes they know the true history. His hope is wan. Not many people know anything about their own past, he thinks, and New Yorkers are most amnesiac of all.

He passes a portrait of De Witt Clinton, remembering his delusions of Roman grandeur, his arrogance and gift for respectable larceny, and he nods in salute. Clinton was, when all was carved upon his tomb, still the man who rammed through the Erie Canal and changed New York from a village to a metropolis. If I had time, Cormac thinks, I would write a book about the man and how his immense ambition led to Fernando Wood and then to Bill Tweed and established forever the long, unbreakable tradition of our corruption.

Another painting shows a group of nine men in respectable clothes, painted tightly and painfully, every detail, every object displayed as proof of successful human existence. They are in an anteroom somewhere, with high ceilings and French furniture, presenting to the viewer a framed and lifeless painting of the Hudson River Valley. Beside Cormac now, a man with the long white hair of an aged bohemian removes his glasses to examine the cramped details and says, “I wonder what they’d have thought of Franz Kline?”

Cormac smiles and says, “They might have loved him.” Which they surely would have, had they lived to know that sweet man with his plain worker’s face. The old bohemian turns to Cormac and says, “Yeah, or they might have burned him in City Hall Park.”

They both laugh, and Cormac feels an exuberant conversation about to begin. But then he sees a piece of sculpture against the wall to the right and he is drawn away.

Cormac’s heart thrums as he stands before a marble version of Venus, with both arms mercifully intact, executed in the style of Canova. He knew the sculptor. He knew the model. Her name was Catherine Underwood, and for four years in the mid-1860s, she was Cormac’s wife. His only wife. Catherine something Underwood. He met her at Niblo’s Opera House, three weeks after she arrived with her widowed mother from England, penniless, hopeful, and beautiful. Her mother died of consumption within a year, but by then Cormac and Catherine had married. The mother, of course, disapproved. She wanted a rich husband. Catherine wanted love. Catherine won. Cormac was driven to marriage by loneliness, by the need for a warm human dailiness, by his desire for the permanent presence of her astonishing beauty.

He gazes at her marble face now, in the year 2001, and remembers how they lived in a small, comfortable flat in Horatio Street, financed by his work at newspapers and the sale of an occasional still life or cityscape. She uttered banalities in an exquisite accent. Her manners were excellent too, and she dined with a languid grace, and posed for his brush with a languid grace, and made love in the same vaguely beautiful, languid way. He was bored with her after nine months, and in his solitude often longed for the silky pleasures of the Countess de Chardon. He was certain that she was bored too.

She was. Cormac doesn’t need to bend close to squint at the caption. The sculpture was done by his closest friend, a dashing and drunken genius named Trevor Morris Parker, who stole Catherine from Cormac and took her and his chisels off to Rome. The date on the sculpture is wrong. The piece must have been done in 1868. After she left him. The cold polished marble can’t convey the color of her flesh, of course, the silkiness of her pubic hair, the soapy smell of her neck. But in his Roman studio, Trevor got the firm plumpness of her breasts right and the contours of her belly and buttocks. He got the languor of the pose. He got the emptiness of the eyes.

Cormac walks around the statue twice, the glistening stone as cold as death, remembering her beside him, so warm on winter nights, and remembering the evening when he discovered she was gone: the card propped against the candle in the kitchen, the keys beside it, the armoire emptied of her clothes. And how he picked up the card, his eyes welling with tears, and read the banal words, about how she was sorry to hurt him, but time healed all wounds, and how then he began to laugh. That night he was filled with an enormous surge of freedom. By morning, he was thinking of her as a character in an opera that somebody else had written.

He turns away from Catherine Underwood, his lost languid Venus, and then another picture catches his eye. He crosses the gallery to look at a carefully painted view of dark buildings and a sky lit up by furious orange flames. Engulfed by the flames are chimneys, useless ladders, roofless walls. Crowds are assembled to watch, herded by leather-capped constables on horseback, while firemen work in impotent anger with their frozen, waterless pumps. In the lower corner of the picture, two men stand safely on a stone balcony, one of them wearing a swirling cape. The caption explains that this is the Great Fire of 1835 and the painter is Anonymous. Cormac knows better. It once hung on the wall of Bill Tweed’s suite in the Ludlow Street jail. The painter was Cormac Samuel O’Connor.

Then he senses an odor of perfume. A woman leans in beside him to read the caption.

Elizabeth Warren.

“I didn’t know that New York had a great fire too,” she says in a cool way. “London did, of course….”

“This was an amazing fire too,” Cormac says. “It destroyed more than seven hundred buildings, a third of the city.”

“Good God.”

She straightens up, her head rising on her long neck, and she looks at Cormac with those wide-spaced hazel eyes.

“Well, how did it start?”

“Arson.”

“You’re kidding me.”

She has one of those Atlantic accents that are acquired by Brits who spend years in America and Americans who spend parts of their youth in Britain. Precise use of words. Hard consonants. Cormac flashes, absurdly, on Pat Moynihan and George Plimpton. Away off, someone begins playing a piano. “Dancing in the Dark”…

“It was a form of urban renewal,” Cormac says. “The old Dutch houses were too small for profit, and someone—almost certainly a landlord—torched one of them, and then another. Just to get rid of them and rebuild with larger buildings and higher rents.” I have you, love, and we can face the music, togeth-er…. “Then a huge wind came off the harbor, and the thing went out of control. There was no water either. See, in here? It was bitter cold, just before Christmas, and even the river was frozen. Down there? Those are firemen whose pumps are useless.”

“Are you a historian?”

“Well, I’ve read a lot of the city’s history.”

He can’t tell her that he is in the painting too, there in the distance, tiny and furtive in the purple shadows under the orange flames. Making notes and sketches. The piano pushes through the murmur of marbleized voices. The sound of the old tunes pushes in from the other room. “Looking for the light of a new love…”

“New York does have a history, doesn’t it?” she says. “So many American cities have a past but no history.”

Cormac looks at her and smiles.

“That’s true,” he says.

And feels that a last act is beginning.

97.

In the morning, there are five messages on the answering machine. Healey cancels breakfast, promising an explanation later in the day, then explaining he’s got a live one on the line from Hollywood. Delfina says she’s just checking in. The other calls are from the mysterious Area Code 800, the vast hidden limbo of American life, selling services for high-speed telephone lines or newspaper delivery or real estate. Cormac calls Delfina and gets her machine. He leaves a message. In the shower, he feels a jittery nervousness, as if various unseen filaments were trying to form a web.

After the shower, dried, shaved, dressed, he sees the message light blinking again on the answering machine. He plays it.

“Hello, this is Elizabeth Warren. We met last night at the museum. My husband and I are having a dinner party on Friday night and I’d love it if you could come. We could talk more about great fires and such. I think you’d find it amusing….”

He calls back and gets a social secretary with a French accent and writes down the details. He thinks: The rivers are converging.

98.

In the foreground is Delfina, but now, back near the tree line in an imagined landscape, Elizabeth Warren makes her appearance too. In small ways, Delfina is revealing herself, and so is Cormac. They speak by telephone. They send e-mails. On one of his walks, he throws away his cigarettes, and when he tells her this, she says perhaps she’ll do the same. “The smell is disgusting,” she says. “I can’t stand it sometimes…. And I can’t stand going all the way down to the street to smoke with the other addicts. It’s a long way to go in my building….”

He takes her to lunch at Windows on the World, high above the city, and she’s excited by the views, which are even more spectacular than the views from her office, Cormac, in a smaller way, is also impressed. He can see the Bronx and much of New Jersey and the slopes of Brooklyn. Pieces of the undiscovered country. He can see the greensward of Central Park and the roof of the Metropolitan Museum and the mesas of apartment houses, one of which contains the Warrens. He can look down at the pinnacle of the Woolworth Building, where he worked humping steel in 1912 and watched Cass Gilbert gazing from Broadway in troubled acceptance of his own masterpiece. He can see human beings down on Church Street, the size of commas. In Delfina’s presence, he fights off the past: It is gone, finished, unrecoverable (he tells himself), and yet might indeed be parked in what was called a century earlier the Fourth Dimension. Another phrase now lost.

Delfina begins to relax with him. To make bad jokes. To drop the street language. To be at once younger and older. She makes no moves at all toward permanence. Time is provisional. Perhaps they will meet tomorrow. Perhaps after work she will come to his bed. Perhaps she will not. She loves the bookshelves in his loft and borrows a book about Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the Benefactor, who tortured and killed some of her relatives in the Dominican Republic. Then she talks about the mayor’s long year of tabloid agony, and how if Donna, the mayor’s wife, were Dominican, she’d have cut off his thing and thrown herself on the mercy of the court.

She avoids asking now about his past. And she never mentions the future. She has a new job and wants to do well, but the job, like Cormac, is part of the present tense. Along with food, drink, and bed.

When he’s alone, he realizes that she is living one narrative and he is living another. He doesn’t mention Elizabeth Warren. And he is not certain what Delfina’s hidden narrative contains. His own contains too many secrets.

99.

The butler is tall, dark-haired, about forty. He nods at Cormac’s name, takes a drink order, and says, “They’re all out on the terrace, Mister O’Connor.” A landsman, the accent pure Belfast. No sentence from the North is ever declarative; every statement contains the possibility of some other way of seeing the same set of facts. Like Yiddish, a language that contains escape. In his nod, and the slight smile, Cormac senses an acknowledgment of old conspiracies. Across a long, quietly lit room he sees glass doors with silhouettes moving behind them against the darkening sky. Then Elizabeth Warren is coming to greet him.

“Oh, Cormac, welcome, welcome.”

Dressed in a black Armani frock, knee-length with a scoop neck, short sleeves. Her lean, flawless arms. A sudden glitter of diamonds from her earrings. Cartier, of course. And those shoes Cormac saw in a story in the Times. Manolo something. Her tan darker in the muted light.

“Did Patrick take your drink order?”

“He did.”

She grasps each of his hands in greeting, her own hands cool, then leads him toward the balcony. They’re on the top floor of a triplex, high above Fifth Avenue, a few blocks north of the Frick. A story on the Internet told him that the Warrens occupy sixteen rooms here, but the place has a sense of planned, cultivated intimacy. He glances in passing around this wide sitting room that opens to the deep terrace and wonders if the terrace counts as a room. Off to the right: a huge silvery Sargent portrait of a redhaired woman in a full silk gown; Sargent, as always, makes the silk whisper. Luscious paint, buttery skin. Two Corots. Real ones. A Degas view of a racecourse. A wall of leathery books, tooled morocco, complete works and matching sets. Cormac remembers a party forty years earlier, a few blocks from this place, where the ex-chorus-girl wife of a real estate operator gazed at a similar wall of collected works and argued with a friend: “That can’t be Thackeray. Thackeray is green.”

Then Willie Warren himself comes forward and Elizabeth introduces them. He smiles in a tentative way, lifts a tumbler of scotch in salute, brushes at his untended hair with the other hand. Dark business suit. Violet tie. His face is fleshy, sweaty, but not yet fat. He has a pleasant smile.

“Ah, yes, Mister O’Connor. You’re a kind of historian, I take it. I’ve heard so much about you from Elizabeth. Welcome.”

A small tuxedoed Latino man arrives with Cormac’s cut-glass tumbler of ice water, the cold base wrapped in a cloth napkin.

“Thanks for having me,” Cormac says to Warren. “And by the way, this morning’s paper was terrific.”

“Well, that’s refreshing to hear. Usually people come to me with some kind of complaint, bitch, bitch, bitch, the usual New York thing—and I have to keep saying, ‘I’m just the publisher!’ ” He laughs. “But please, tell my editor, will you? Oh, Mister James, here’s a fan.”

And then it’s like an anthology of a thousand other New York dinner parties: drinks, remarks, and rehearsed wit, mixed with testing, auditioning, seducing. Warren introduces Cormac to Max James, his small, intense editor. Thinning gray hair. A bitter slash of mouth. Cormac says he was a copy boy at the Post in the three months before Dolly Schiff sold it to Rupert Murdoch (a lie, of course), and James says it’s much more fun running a paper for Warren—a tabloid in a broadsheet dress—than hanging around the bowels of the New York Times, where he worked for twenty-three years. Nobody mentions the story in New York magazine the year before, the article that said Max James left the Times for Warren’s rowdier broadsheet because he’d been told he was completely out of the running for the top editor’s job. “He’s too much of a prick,” said one anonymous source. “Even for the Times.” They chat now about Punch and Mort and Rupert and the problems that all of them are having and how the papers would be in a lot better shape if the Mets would start playing the way they did the year before, since nobody likes reading about losers. But Cormac can see the editor’s eyes wandering, longing to talk to the other guests, to Someone Important, instead of wasting time (at Warren’s command) with this unknown. Cormac wishes Healey could appear at his side, with his genius for disruption. And then Elizabeth is there to take him away.

“Come, you must meet the others,” she says.

She introduces Cormac to a few guests. Casually, smiling, then slipping away. Cormac exchanges polite nods, pleased-to-meet-yous. Men sipping. Ice clinking. He hears Billie Holiday singing from the inside room: “He’s Funny That Way.” Across the park, the tall broad-shouldered buildings of Central Park West are forming a black wall pierced with diamonds. The plump Dakota. Rosemary’s terrible baby. John Lennon lying in his blood. “Just glad I’m living…” The sky over New Jersey is orange streaked with purple. An airliner heads north before the right turn to LaGuardia, using the black line of the river as a guide. Much lower, helicopters beat toward Thirtieth Street. Cormac can see the Twin Towers in the distance, flashes on Delfina, the spirals, turns back into the party, remembering when all of this was fields and sky.

He shakes hands with a small pinched investment banker who reminds him of John Jay when he came back to New York after the signing of the peace treaty in Paris. The treaty that brought independence from the British. Jay in turn reminded him of the little dance teacher who used to come to Hughson’s to marvel at the Africans. Jay and his dreadful wife, her large pointed bosom always at attention… The investment banker’s name is Ridley. He has no interest in Cormac, of course, and why should he? He shakes hands and keeps talking. He’s saying that anybody with a tenth of a brain could have foreseen the death of the dot-coms. “But nobody wanted to face it,” he says. “They thought they could have capitalism without profits.”

“They were putting money in the NASDAQ without even knowing what the initials stood for,” says a tall, smiling man whose teeth are very white against his tanned skin. His name is Farragut and Cormac knows from the Post business pages that he’s in real estate. “By the way, what do they stand for?”

They all laugh.

“Everybody made mistakes,” says a balding, heavyset man named Sterman. He works for some vague foundation. The National Institute of Some Kind of Policy. A major fund-raiser for the Democratic party. “Even Clinton. He should have blocked that goddamned suit against Bill Gates. Microsoft was the El Dorado, the real thing, a technology outfit with real profits. It made a thousand other people think they could hit the same jackpot. When that asshole judge found Microsoft guilty, the gold rush ended.”

“That was part of it,” says Ridley. “I agree. The illusion was crucial to the thing. But Clinton’s dick didn’t help.”

“Yeah, Frank, but this dickhead in the White House isn’t helping either.”

On the edge of the terrace, flicking ashes into a planter, a former ambassador to Prague is talking to a television reader named Brownlee. Cormac reaches for his pack of cigarettes, but he has none on his person. He knows that if he borrows only one he’ll be smoking again at midnight. A lean, tanned woman named Peggy Ashley, the operator of a Soho gallery, her beige dress accentuating her deep early-season Saint Martin tan, listens to the talking men, her brow furrowing in concentration, while behind her back a film director named Johnson chats with a black banker and a pitching coach for the Yankees. They are people who resemble the subject matter of a newspaper. Emblems of the new century: eclectic and democratic, delegates from the meritocracy.

All remain true to certain New York traditions, which Cormac first saw in the Brownstone Republic in the 1840s. That tradition still insists, among many other things, that it’s bad form at social gatherings to ask a stranger what he or she does for a living. As he’s introduced, Cormac is not asked what he does. Hangover from the 1840s, when no rich New Yorker under fifty had ever done anything at all. In those refined precincts, the children of the rich were trained to be useless. The second wave, after the Civil War, avoided all queries because each of them was a secret gangster. Now they all let you know what they do, to avoid being asked. Cormac notices that they show their identity cards now with hints, angular references, declarations of hard-earned knowledge. Don’t ask, I’ll tell. The blond wife of the pitching coach, with the sun-crinkled, glowing face of a retired airline stewardess, doesn’t know the rules. She asks Cormac what he does. He smiles (wanting to protect her too) and tells her he’s a kind of historian.

“How wonderful,” she says. “Of what?”

“New York City.”

“Cool,” she says. “I must tell Mike. He loves history, ’specially the Civil War and World War Two. He has every book Stephen Ambrose ever wrote. And he must have fifty books at home about the Civil War. He talks about Grant and Lee like he pitched against them….”

The sky is mauve now. When she mentions the Civil War, he sees Bill Tweed shouting for calm. He is in bed in Tweed’s mansion, his thigh taped, his head in bandages, and Tweed says, “What sword?” He mumbles to the former stewardess about the Civil War in New York, and the Irish Legion marching bravely off to die, and General Meagher with his mad courage, and the way the town boomed, selling uniforms and blankets. And all the cripples later. She smiles in a fixed way. She wants Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Not this bore, with his dark visions. She turns in relief to a new tray of drinks.

Proper nouns ricochet around the terrace: Rudy and Donna, Dubya and Clinton, Piazza and Clemens, Gates and Rupert. The verbs don’t matter. What matters is to be current, to speak intimately about public figures. Cormac drifts to the edge of the balcony. The former ambassador to Prague and Peggy from the Soho gallery are discussing Kokoschka. Cormac could mention that he talked one long afternoon in 1909 with Gustav Mahler on a park bench across from the Majestic. The composer loved the sound of Klaxons and bicycle bells, and mumbled about his goddamned wife, Alma. Here, among the guests of the Warrens, Cormac chooses the silence of a lifetime and says nothing. After all, how could he have known Mahler when he looks as if he were born around the time of the Kennedy assassination? All these decades later, he looks about forty.

The Metropolitan is still brightly lit, its roof washed coppery green, and lights mark the paths cut into the blackness of the park. Away off to the right, on the northern rim, is the rosy sky over Harlem. Cormac flashes again on Stanford White: his ruddy face and twinkling eyes as he describes his plans for the Harlem block later called Striver’s Row. Our Bernini, creating the vision of New York the way Bernini invented modern Rome. All of that in a forgotten year before Harlem turned black; before the great exodus from Thirtieth Street and Hudson began (down there where the helicopters land); before Minton’s and Monroe’s Uptown and Frank’s restaurant and Duke Ellington. And then, absurdly, Cormac again sees Washington in his bloodstained shirt, sword in hand, standing straight up, nostrils flaring, shouting to his men to fight these bastards, fight them and they’ll run…. And right up there, Bantu died. And Carlito and Big Michael, Silver and Aaron, and from here it all looks so small and bare when it was once huge and dense with woods.

Then Warren is beside him. He hears Vivaldi playing from the inside room.

“Every time I see this view,” Warren says, “at this time of the evening, I feel like I’ve died and gone to Heaven.”

“It sure is beautiful.”

“So what kind of history are you writing?”

“It’ll be about New York. I guess I’ll write it to find out what it is.”

“I wish we had some history in the paper.”

“Good idea. Although someone once said that journalism was history in a hurry. So, in a way, the paper is filled with history.”

“Yes, but there’s no goddamned context in any of our papers. They write as if everything is happening for the first time.”

“Even if it’s the first time that week,” Cormac says.

“Or that morning.”

He laughs, sips his scotch, and lays a foot on the rim of a flowerpot.

“Hey, what about you taking a crack at doing—I don’t know—a history column for us? You know, giving us some of that goddamned context. If the mayor and his wife have a battle over Gracie Mansion, tell us who Gracie was and where he got his money and how the mansion got there and how the mayor of New York came to live in it. That kind of thing.”

“Good idea,” Cormac hears himself saying. “But I’d better finish what I’m doing first.”

“I mean, who the hell was Major Deegan, anyway?” He smiles broadly. “One of Rupert’s Aussies once looked up from his desk down on South Street, gazed at the FDR Drive, and asked, Who is this F.D.R.?” He switches to a British accent, very plummy. “Who is this F.D.R., anyway?”

Cormac laughs, encouraging Warren.

“Well, at least I know who Washington Heights is named for, even if I don’t really know where the hell it is.”

“It’s right up there,” Cormac says, pointing up toward the George Washington Bridge. He wants to say, You have an ancestor who lived there once, his bones long scoured by the river and the sea. Instead, he says, “Irving Place, in Gramercy Park, is named for Washington Irving, our first great New York writer, and Irving was named for George Washington too. Everything’s connected.”

“God damn it,” Warren says with enthusiasm, “we could have a weekly feature just on the names of streets! Explain who Irving was, and Beekman, and Bayard, and Mott, all those streets downtown… Of course, we’d get some letters asking who the first Mister Broadway was.”

“Joe Namath, I think.”

“Exactly,” he says. “A great figure of the distant 1960s…”

The former ambassador to Prague puts a cigarette out in a flowerpot, thus licensing the owner of the Soho art gallery to do the same. Brownlee the anchorman doesn’t smoke. Anchormen never smoke. Patrick arrives on the terrace.

“Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served….”

He bows, sweeps an arm toward the interior, and Elizabeth leads the way. Cormac now realizes that the Sargent must be a portrait of a descendant of Bridget Riley. Taller, grander, more at ease. But the same color of hair. Same neck. Same audacious defiance in the eyes. A daughter of Tony Warren, perhaps. He had three children, according to the charts in the Archive, at least one of them a son, before he came to New York to die in the American Revolution. To die, that is, thinks Cormac, at my hands. Had to be late Sargent, just before he left London, sick of painting paugh-traits, as he said, around the time he began subverting his subjects instead of serving them. Painting them as they were instead of as they wished to be. Like Velázquez. Cormac thinks: It’s her, all right. Some kind of Riley. A granddaughter, perhaps. Or great-granddaughter. Of course.

They go down a flight of carpeted stairs to the next level, filing along a cream-colored banister, finished in matte enamel like all the other woodwork; moving past two Bonnards and a Vuillard. Remembering the ghastly Meissoniers in the homes of the rich a century ago, all those heroic Frenchmen dying in the fields of the empire, facing the naked Egyptian maidens of Alta-Tadema across the room, poised to be seduced by Islam. At the foot of the stairs, a Matisse from the Fauve period. Green shadows, yellow cheekbones. The guests now all chatting, glancing at the paintings. Cormac glimpses a corridor with many enameled doors, some surely leading to still other doors. And here are more paintings. Cormac feels like a burglar casing a target. Raffles without the mask. Peggy from the art gallery tugs the sleeve of the retired diplomat and nods at a Kokoschka self-portrait, rippling with muscular impasto.

They pass the closed doors and into another large living room, designed as a refuge from winter, filled now by people whose chatter anticipates the coming summer. Tonight must be the last dinner party until after Labor Day. He notes the Persian rugs on oak floors that are perfectly tongued and grooved. Tall, deep fireplace, leather chairs, orderly bookcases (including bindings designed by Stanford White, whose presence never leaves New York), art books piled on tables, muted lamps, three original wash drawings by Delacroix, a Hopper evocation of a desolate beach, and on one wall, a portrait of Elizabeth Warren, ivory-skinned in Madame X gown and lighting, by one of those painters who still aspire to be Sargent. No Jeff Koons. No Schnabel. Not even the usual Marilyn or Mao from Warhol. Conservative taste everywhere, but confident, sure of quality.

On a grand Steinway, original sheet music awaits someone’s loving gaze, as the keys await caressing fingers. The paper is browning and slightly ragged. Gershwin. “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Images of the Brill Building: seven pianos on each floor; Joe Liebling’s telephone booth Indians working the golden lobby. On top of the piano, laid upon doilies, are family photographs in Tiffany frames. The new Tiffany. Cormac pauses as the other guests back up before entering the dining room, while others search for place cards. Cormac sees Elizabeth and her husband in Positano. In the Yucatán. On the Riviera, and on a market street in what appears to be Bangkok. On yachts. On matched motorcycles. On horseback. There they are with both Bushes, Clinton, Reagan, Princess Di. In the city room of a newspaper. In a secret garden.

Into the wood-paneled dining room now. Chased mirrors. A single perfectly lit drawing by Rubens. All of them bending, leaning, examining place cards. The gleam of plates and yellow roses in a fluted silver bowl.

Delfina.

Where are you at this very moment?

Warren is at one end of the long polished table, Elizabeth at the other, facing him with all the others between them, as in a thousand New Yorker cartoons. Cormac is to her left. The black wife of a black banker is to Cormac’s left. Ochre-skinned, plump, bejeweled, and nervous. A woman in her fifties. She and Cormac exchange hellos and a handshake. She wonders why Donna doesn’t just pack up and leave Gracie Mansion. And is it true that the mayor has moved in with two gay guys? She read that in the Post, so she isn’t sure it’s true. She has a marvelous smile. Her husband is down at the far end beside Warren. His name is Criswell, white-haired, slight trace of Jamaican accent when he was introduced to Cormac. To Elizabeth’s right is Max James, and he flatters her with questions about her opinions on the economy and who might win the election for mayor. To the right of James are Peggy from Soho, Brownlee the anchorman, a woman whose name Cormac didn’t get but surely the wife of one of the men, wearing the blank look that comes from the double slumber of the marriage bed. Then Ridley, the John Jay double, and a single woman with streaked blond hair, same age as Elizabeth. Probably the same gym. Wearing a just-divorced look and a tan from two weeks at Canyon Ranch. Boy, girl, boy, girl.

Waiters arrive now with salad, with succulent tomatoes, cheese crisp or runny, while a steward expertly offers wine. There’s a thin clinking of glass, the touching of forks to plates. Cormac doesn’t need to turn over a blue-patterned plate to know that it’s delft, most of it from the early nineteenth century, passed down to this table from some outpost of the Warren diaspora. Rills of laughter from the far end, in the same tone as the pinging of glass. The voice of a man who sounds as if he has swallowed a banjo. Warren brushing his hair with his fingers. Max asking Elizabeth about dot-commers. Silverware from Tiffany. Heavy and confident. The old Tiffany. Napkins folded into bishops’ miters. And here’s the food. The culinary neutrality of veal.

Warren addresses them all: “Can somebody please tell me what this whole globalization thing is all about? I see them in Seattle. I see them in Genoa. At war against Starbucks, it looks to me. But I just don’t know what the hell they want.”

“They want to spread poverty and pestilence to every corner of the earth, starting with us,” says the former ambassador to Prague. “They want to democratize misery.”

“Oh, that’s pretty drastic, don’t you think, Larry?” says Elizabeth. “Most of them seem fairly decent sorts.”

“Yes, and they want a hippie paradise,” says the former ambassador to Prague. “You know, small is beautiful, everybody eating roots on five square feet of land in some malarial forest. Everybody wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and begging God, of course, to provide. It’s pure sentimental rot. And as the Nazis taught us, sentimentality can kill millions.”

“But they do have a certain nostalgic charm,” says Peggy from Soho. “It’s right out of Haight-Ashbury.”

“We know what they’re against, Peggy,” Warren says. “But what are they for?”

At tables like these, generation after generation, Cormac has heard variations on the same question. What did the Africans want? What did the South want? What did the Irish want and the Italians and the Jews? And, of course, what did women want? He glances back toward the living room and is startled by a gigantic Lucian Freud painting of an immobilized man and a fat naked woman. He missed it coming in to find his place card. The only painting that is not by a traditional painter. Raw and brutal. Cormac flashes on the year when he focused all of his own painting on ugliness. To destroy all bullshit notions of beauty. Is the painted man knitting? Is the man a man? What does Lucian Freud want?

And as the courses arrive, and plates are exchanged, and silverware removed, all under the watchful eye of Patrick, he remembers those great groaning boards of the nineteenth century and the men and women whose motto was: We eat, therefore we are. The era of the 25,000-calorie meal. Tonight, Cormac thinks, the guests of the Warrens are unwittingly doing what their obscene social ancestors did: behaving like the people who provoked the French Revolution. The style is low-key, and Elizabeth seems relaxed, casual, understated, confident. After all, Renay the florist comes each week to fill the house with delicious aromas, and Patrick assures a perfect flow of movement at the table. Light, fresh calamari salad. Veal roast. Potatoes. Frozen soufflé. Cormac thinks: We’re in the era of cholesterol, blood sugar, and coronary heart disease. But they still use newspapers to provide conversation at dinner. They don’t argue about what Horace Greeley said anymore, of course; he is a statue in City Hall Park, keeping a bilious eye on J&R Music; they discuss Tom Friedman’s column in the Times, or Safire, or Maureen Dowd. They laugh at some dreadful bulletin in Page Six of the Post, about people they know, or a column by Stanley Crouch in the News, about people they will never know. Once Dana or Bennett, Pulitzer or Hearst inflamed these dining tables, igniting the flames of outraged invective. They rasped about Walter Lippmann or Dorothy Thompson and wanted to abolish the First Amendment. In their presence, Cormac acquired the habit that he maintains here tonight: saying nothing memorable. He doesn’t want attention. He wants to be a blur. An observing blur. In the past, he didn’t want to be remembered by such people. He wanted to remember. Still does.

And so the talk goes back and forth, sometimes joined by all the guests, sometimes breaking down to knots of two or three. Globalization and the Middle East and Alaskan oil drilling and stem cell research. Or, in several ways, What do the Palestinians want? Elizabeth is cool and distracted, ushering in each new course with the tinkle of a golden bell, providing paragraph breaks for the chatter. She says little. She does not flirt. Not with Cormac. Not with anyone. Beyond reproach, they’d have said in the corseted gloom of Gramercy Park. He hears someone say, without irony, “Only the strong survive.” And turns his gaze on the Rubens drawing. A muscled man with a warrior’s shield, an imagining of a scene Rubens surely never saw. Cormac thinks: The truth is that the strong don’t always survive. Usually the weak survive and the cowardly and the mediocre. They gather their forces to destroy the strong, because the strong are at the core of their fear. They burned strong Africans at the stake and reduced others to tortured rubble. Cormac used to think of them as the League of Frightened White Men. Some of them are here at this table. Frightened of change. Frightened of the new. Frightened of losing secret powers, privileges, and control. Imagining apocalypse. The kind of people who destroyed Bill Tweed.

Criswell, the black banker, rises to offer a toast. “I’d like to salute our host and his lovely wife,” he says. “They have brought a measure of grace and glamour to our city. They have begun to make it more just, to use what they have to help the process of healing. I don’t want to embarrass them by reciting their accomplishments. Everyone at this table knows them.” Pause. An image of Tomora brushes through Cormac. “But all of us have benefited from their presence, and we thank them for their friendship.” He raises his glass. Max James shouts, “Hear! Hear!” All sip, including Cormac. Then all sit. Warren remains standing.

“If I have one more glass of wine, I’m likely to start believing such kind words, Mister Criswell,” he says. “But I do want to thank all of you for your presence, for your kindness to us these past few years, for your support in what we’re doing at the newspaper—and for what I hope shall be long and enduring friendships. I toast all of you.”

“Hear, hear,” shouts James. Cormac notices Patrick hovering in the adjoining room, hands at his side. In his chilly eyes, the deepest kind of skepticism. Elizabeth tinkles a bell.

“Now,” she says, “some brandy and cigars.”

Cohibas, of course.

Cormac longs for a cigarette.

They all rise and begin to drift and scatter. A few slip away home, their minds already on breakfast meetings. Cormac pauses to look more carefully at the Rubens, at the extraordinary confidence of his hand as it laid down charcoal and washes. Then he strolls down one of the corridors. Some doors are open. He glimpses a mahogany four-poster covered with a handmade quilt. Then Elizabeth is behind him, with Brownlee the anchorman.

“It’s the fourth door on the right,” she says. “If you need the little-boys’ room, Cormac.”

He bows and thanks her. Into the men’s room. A lithograph by Francisco Toledo above the toilet. The master of Oaxaca. Individual Brazilian napkins for drying hands. The Internet story about the Warrens said they had six bathrooms in addition to sixteen rooms. Cormac thinks: I have lived in quarters smaller than this bathroom. Outside again, he faces a drawing by Pascin, delicate and erotic. Another door is open. Elizabeth waves him in. She’s explaining the decor to the anchorman. Each room has a kind of theme, she says, tracing the history of the United States through furniture, art, interior decoration. “My husband’s idea,” she says. “The Warrens have been here a long time.” Yes. Since 1741. Here, for example, are the 1930s, with first editions of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson. Framed sheet music by Rodgers and Hart. Photographs made in Sacramento of Warren’s father and grandfather. All standing by automobiles whose license plates provide the year.

In the next room, through a connecting door, World War One, and a doughboy helmet, and photographs from the AEF, and a framed 78 rpm recording of Enrico Caruso’s version of “Over There.” Cormac thinks of Jack London dying of pills and booze, Carnegie and Frick dying in the same year, while Wilson blathered about war and peace and civilization above the rumble of parades, drums, funerals, and memorials. The anchorman seems touched.

“My grandfather died over there,” he says.

Elizabeth says, “So did mine.”

They pass from the Gold Rush to the Mauve Decade (or the Gilded Age, Elizabeth says, or the Gay Nineties) to Prohibition, a room for each. San Francisco newspaper headlines. Photos of costume parties. Ostrich feathers and a battered hip flask. Flappers by John Held Jr. In each room, a bed, or a couch, or a desk. The anchorman excuses himself, and now Elizabeth directs him to the boys’ room.

Cormac and Elizabeth enter another room. Photographs of Elizabeth at a girls’ boarding school in Switzerland. With parents, slightly dowdy, in Folkestone. Standing beside Warren on the worn steps of an Anglican church. Some framed letters of thanks from various New York charity organizations. A desk and a Mark Cross blotter upon which sits a leather book of the sort used by hostesses a century ago to arrange seating plans and menus. Books of New York history on six shelves, one shelf devoted to Astors and Vanderbilts and Carnegie. A couch. A smaller desk with a computer and a chair for a secretary.

“This is my study,” she says. “It has no decor at all.”

Then, to the side of the bookcase, Cormac sees a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of a lily, and to the side of the O’Keeffe a graphite drawing he made many years ago. The paper has darkened over time, making it resemble a silverpoint. It shows the secret place of the Countess de Chardon.

“Where did you get this?” he says.

She smiles. Gently tips the door closed. “That? You like that, I suppose? I’m almost sure it’s from Christie’s. They told me it was probably done around 1861 or ’62. In there somewhere.”

Wrong by almost thirty years.

“I already had the Georgia O’Keeffe,” she says. “And when I saw this”—stepping closer—“I thought she might have made the drawing too. She was certainly the greatest twentieth-century painter of cunts.”

She likes saying the word, although when she says “cunt” it sounds shaved. Still, she enjoys it the way Delfina likes saying “motherfucker.” She turns, eases her buttocks onto the corner of her desk. Pressing against wood. Staring at Cormac.

“I see what you mean,” Cormac says. “Particularly if you turn the O’Keeffe upside down.”

She smiles in a neutral way.

In the hall, Cormac hears murmuring from the far end, men and women laughing in the buzzed upper register of alcohol. He can now pick out Warren’s loud guffaw.

“One more thing,” she says, glancing toward the laughter and opening another door. She flicks a switch.

Inside, in indirect light, he sees frayed medieval battle flags behind glass, lithographed views of Jerusalem and Acre, dead Crusaders, men holding crosses.

“My husband’s other museum,” she says. “All pretty ghastly, and very interesting.”

Cormac’s heart stops. On the wall to the right, hanging from hooks by leather thongs, some jammed into cracked leather scabbards, are five weapons.

In the center, longer than the others, its corroded face marked by spirals, is his father’s sword.

100.

He leaves the party in a state of fevered blur and icy clarity. At the door all mumble the buttery words of social banality: good night see you soon pleasure to meet you we had a fine time. Warren tells Cormac they must lunch at the Century, or right here again at the apartment, once he returns from a ten-day trip to Europe and Israel. No long summer doldrums for a newspaper publisher, are there? Elizabeth gazes at Cormac in a cool way and shakes his hand at the elevator door. On the sidewalk, under the awning, Ripley offers him a ride. The pitching coach suggests drinks at Elaine’s. Cormac smiles and says he’d better walk off the sumptuous meal. He starts down Fifth Avenue.

His heart is beating hard.

His father’s sword.

Hanging like a trophy on a rich man’s wall. And not any rich man: this rich man, descendant of his father’s murderer.

For years he searched for the sword among collectors and antiquarians, in junk shops and auction rooms. He carried with him sketches of the sword, drawn from memory, showing the spirals. Twice he met with men who tried to sell him clever counterfeits. He held them in his hand, felt their deadness, and knew they were fakes. Once a month, he scrolled through the auction sites of the Internet, saw swords of the same rough design, from the same period in time. All lacked the spirals. Now he has found the sword, through chance or fate. He thinks: I must have it.

Must devise a plan to go back to that triplex on Fifth Avenue and once more hold my father’s sword.

And then, for the final time, I must wield it.

As he walks downtown on Fifth Avenue, he knows this will not be easy. A frontal assault is impossible. There’s a doorman and an elevator operator. And almost certainly a second elevator for deliveries and freight. With another operator. Video cameras. Security alarms, in the building and in the apartment. Hidden buttons and buzzers, at least one connected to the local precinct. The rich live well-defended lives.

No (he thinks): I must return as an invited guest. And then stops.

What about Delfina?

And answers himself: Timing is all.

101.

His dreams are turbulent now. Most take place in the first hour after sleep, but they seem to last for years. He is in them, with time stretched, expanded, slowed, the images more vivid than life, and then he wakes up, trembling.

He sees Delfina in an endless tenement corridor, fleeing a fireball. She wears a terry-cloth robe. The fire is at the far end of the block-long corridor, orange and angry, and she is running toward Cormac. She has an infant bundled in her arms. He extends his arms, unable to move his legs, and can’t reach her, and her face contorts in a scream.

There is the Earl of Warren, rising from the water near the Battery, his clothes and flesh in shreds, his skull devoid of skin.

There is Delfina on the ramparts of the Woolworth Building, smiling and barefoot in a gauzy yellow gown riffled by the high wind. She is unaware of the edge of the copper roof. She whirls in delight, calling his name, Cormac, Cormac, come here, Cormac—and goes off the edge. He is calling to her, leaping for her into the air above the city… and wakes up with his heart hammering.

He sees a horde of men in scarlet, mounted on ten thousand white horses, rising on the rim of the hills around the Sacred Grove, many of them holding machine guns. There is a bellowed command and then they come pounding, the earth shaking, the air filled with explosions, the forest burning, and his mother holds a pike to await their charge, and his father is slashing at them with his sword, and still they come, and one of them waves on his spear the head of Mary Morrigan, and he laughs and sneers.

He is in a cemetery and facing him are all the women he once loved, for a week or a month or a year, and in the center is the Countess de Chardon. They are dancing in morning fog. Some hold lyres. Music comes from beyond the tombstones. They hold hands. He walks forward to join them in the dance, and coming to him is the countess, smiling in welcome, and behind her with her body naked is Delfina.

Then they are gone. He stands in mournful fog. The music still plays. A flute. The pipes. He tries to dance alone and cannot move. He hears a dog barking and knows it is Bran. Here I am, Bran, he shouts. Come to me. But Bran does not come. Nobody comes. Cormac is alone, mourning his dead.

102.

Elizabeth Warren calls and asks Cormac to breakfast on Sunday morning. A wash of betrayal passes through him, as if he were cheating on Delfina, but he agrees to meet Elizabeth in a hotel restaurant just north of Washington Square. On Saturday night, after much splashing in the jacuzzi, and after she had lounged for him on a couch as he traced her body on a charcoal sheet, after he was empty, after she had dozed and purred and said little, he walks to Church Street with Delfina, kisses her good-night, and sends her uptown in a taxi. The following morning, with the fog-thick streets still empty of most human beings, he walks north.

When he sees a brightening ahead, he knows he is almost at Washington Square. And remembers the small ceremony when they opened this land as a park, and how the politicians and clergymen acted as if everything beneath their feet had been cleansed. All of the others in the small crowd knew they were wrong and that this ground would never be cleansed. For this was the execution ground across five decades, going back to the British. There stood the gallows, down to the left of what they all called the Fifth Avenue. Slaves were hanged from that gallows, and patriots, and Jesuits, and deviates, and even, before 1741, three witches. They were buried in shrouds in the swampy earth, where blackberries grew all the way to Bleecker Street, and wild partridge raced through thickets, and fox held their ground against humans until they finally joined the animal exodus to the north. For a year before fencing off the park, the authorities disinterred the bodies, of course, and drained the marsh. But they did not find all of the dead.

And when the mansions started rising on the north side of the square, constructed with Holland brick that had come to America as ballast, and when people named Rhinelander and Minturn and Parish began to shape their mannered lives within the walls (preparing the way for Henry James), the disturbed dead rose on foggy nights.

Cormac knew the dead were there because he had seen them, as he had seen the dead (or the undead, as the Irishman Bram Stoker called them) move through old houses and along those few streets at the tip of the island that still were cobbled. Murderers and Catholics, deviates and freaks, soldiers, seamen, and teamsters driven mad by the city: and then three pale women, the color of ivory, their dresses ragged as fog, walking in the yellow light of gas lamps.

He had last seen the three pale women in Washington Square on a fog-shrouded night in 1971, after a demonstration in the square had railed against the war, against the bombing in Cambodia, against Richard Nixon. He sat on a bench that night for hours after the protestors had gone home, leaving only the litter of their slogans, and then saw the women rise from the waters of the fountain, singing a lament. Every language seemed to have been mixed into the words, which mourned the death of the young. He understood them in English and Irish and Yoruba, in Italian and German and Yiddish. The young must not die, the three pale women sang. Old men must not bury their children. Weep for all the young dead.

After that, he had not seen them again, but he knew they must still be there. Must still inhabit the earth beneath the fountain and the meth dealers, the dog walkers and the Frisbee flingers and the students of semiotics. Preparing fresh laments.

Cormac crosses the square, past the caged Washington arch, separated for years now by a wire fence from citizens who might actually use it, and remembered Stanford White again, on the day it opened, talking a streak, red-haired, laughing, proud that he had designed the arch, chatting with reporters (including Cormac) as if he and the arch would live forever. That day, a young woman brushed against him, eyes wide. He paused, blinked, stared, whispered, and she went off smiling.

The hotel dining room is cozy with dark wood and tinted steel engravings of Little Old New York. Elizabeth Warren isn’t there, but a half-dozen people are already working on breakfast: an older couple, some young people. Cormac hears a fragmented conversation in German about the Statue of Liberty and Windows on the World: destinations of the day. He walks to the reception desk, buys the Sunday Daily News, throws away the special sections and the advertising junk, and, back at the table, glances at the sports pages. He’s reading Mike Lupica’s column when he sees her coming in the door.

She’s wearing one of those expensive pink jogging suits, and dark violet glasses, and a white cotton beret under which she has bundled her hair. She walks in her lean, ratcheting way on thick white running shoes, looking like Monica Vitti leaving the set of a 1960s movie to go to a gym. She sees Cormac, smiles, and he stands as she reaches the table. She brushes his cheek with a kiss, and he can smell a fragrance—apples?—rising from her skin.

“A ghastly morning,” she says. “It’s like London out there.” “The sun will burn it off in an hour.”

“One hopes.” She gazes around. “How cozy. And I’m famished.”

A waiter brings menus. She takes off the sunglasses to read, folding them and tucking them into a pocket of the jogging suit. Her makeup is so subtly applied that she seems to be wearing none at all. There’s a restrained gloss of pale lipstick on her wide mouth.

“I want one of those gigantic American breakfasts,” she says. “Mounds of pancakes and bacon and sausage. The whole lot. And an OJ. And a steaming mug of coffee. Everything.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“I’m still trying to get over last night,” she says. “We saw this movie about Pearl Harbor, and I exhausted myself laughing. Have you seen it?”

“I’d rather go to jail.”

“Oh, you must see it. It’s so ghastly that you can’t help yourself. My husband, as usual, thought I was crazy. But—”

“How is he?”

The waiter returns with a coffee pot, pours two cups, takes their orders, moves silently away.

“How is he? Oh, he’s what he is. A perfectly kind and loving man. Full of mad idealism.”

She says this like one of those Brits who believe that most Americans are botched Brits.

“He’s doing a good job with the newspaper,” Cormac says. “Isn’t he, though? Excellent. Even I’ve begun to read it.” “That would make a good commercial.”

“Yes, wouldn’t it, though. But in that case, I’d rather go to jail.” The food arrives. She eats with the greedy carelessness of someone who believes she’ll always be thin. And Cormac thinks: Delfina eats as if she will die tomorrow. Elizabeth finishes before Cormac. Talking all the while about the president, and missile defense (“Who exactly are the Americans planning to defend themselves from?”). Then, glancing at the engravings, she goes on about New York, and her discoveries, and the energy of the city, and the good manners of its citizens. “It’s come a long way since Mrs. Trollope was here,” she says. “Have you ever read her book?”

“Yes,” Cormac says (remembering the woman’s pinched, nervous face). “She had an unforgiving eye for human weakness.”

“Exactly. I should do a sequel. ‘Domestic Manners of the New Americans.’ ”

Cormac finishes breakfast. A Mexican busboy takes their plates. Cormac yearns for a cigarette and wonders if nicotine withdrawal has been giving him bad dreams.

“I so wish I could belch,” Elizabeth says. “But the ghost of Mrs. Trollope is intimidating.”

“If anyone notices, I’ll explain you’re an Arab. New Yorkers believe anything you tell them about Arabs. They’ve become what the Irish were in the nineteenth century.”

Her eyes bright with schoolgirlish conspiracy, she covers her mouth with a napkin and smothers a gassy belch. Then laughs.

“I did it, I did it!”

“Excuse me. I have to call Page Six.”

“No, no, not that!”

She talks then about Page Six and the gossip columns in the Daily News and what wicked fun all of them are, unless you are the subject of their wicked scrutiny. The waiter pours fresh coffee. Then Elizabeth Warren seems to wind down, poking a spoon into the coffee, her elbows on the table. She looks up, her face serious.

“Let me ask you something,” she says.

“Sure.”

She seems embarrassed.

“Are you a free man?”

“I suppose.”

“Don’t suppose. You’re not married, I take it. But do you have a woman?”

A moment of hesitation. “I’m seeing a lot of a woman.”

She smiles in a rueful way.

“God damn it.”

Cormac says nothing.

“Before we moved here,” she says, “one of my friends warned me. All the attractive men, she said, are married, or drunks, or gay.”

She sips her coffee.

“But I’d like to see more of you. You look like a man who can keep a secret. And there’s something you can help me do.”

Cormac does not ask her to define that something.

“And you’re cautious too,” she says. “That always helps.” Now there’s a hint of hardness in her voice and she glances at her watch. “I have to see my husband, alas.”

She gets up, forces a smile, and shakes Cormac’s hand.

“I’d better go,” she says. “The agents of Page Six are everywhere.” She leans close, kisses him on the mouth. Then she turns and walks across the restaurant, hips ratcheting, and goes out to the city.

103.

Before leaving the hotel, he buys a pack of Vantage cigarettes. Outside, the fog has lifted and he uses book matches to light his first cigarette in nine days. He feels a mixture of failure and relief. Then, walking east along the edge of the park, with children now playing in the grass with their fathers or mothers (the nannies all off for the day), and a few stray homeless men scouting benches, he inhales deeply and thinks about Elizabeth Warren. Nicotine, after all, is a clarifying drug. He is groping for clarity.

There’s something about Elizabeth Warren, he thinks (dropping his cigarette butt down a sewer opening), that is not Elizabeth Warren. She faces left when she should be facing right. In one way, she’s the woman she presents to the world: cool and smooth and intelligent. But the woman at breakfast was a flopped tracing of that original, the reverse of what she seems to be, while remaining the same woman. The cool Elizabeth at breakfast revealed someone hotter and darker. Clearly, she’s pulling me, a total stranger, into something that she wants me to do. The lure is familiar: the hidden pleasures between her lean thighs. But she hints at something else. Something about her husband. As if her need has detected my need.

As if she wants help in a killing.

104.

He reaches the Astor Place station and then he sees a man coming up the stairs. His name is Bobby Simmons, and he has skin the color of tea with milk, hair almost white, a hunched stance. He’s carrying a worn saxophone case covered with hotel decals and old clearances from customs. Cormac blocks his way. The old man looks at his face as if he’s being challenged, and then smiles.

“Gahdamn,” Simmons says. “It’s you for sure, ain’t it? Cormac O’Connor himself.”

They embrace as Simmons reaches the street. People move around them, glancing at fresh newspapers, taking Metrocards from their wallets.

“Hello, Bobby,” Cormac says.

“Gahdamn, such a long time.”

Simmons is breathless from climbing the subway stairs and from the seventy-six years he carries on his spare frame.

“I didn’t know you were back from Europe,” Cormac says. “Six weeks now, and damn, the dirty ol’ Apple looks good. Never seen so many good-lookin’ women all at one time.” He grins and starts walking west, Cormac beside him. “I was gone fourteen months, ya know. Paris—mostly Paris—but Copenhagen too, and London, and Prague, and hey, even Dublin, man. With your people. Crazy motherfuckers, your people. They got music comin’ outta they asses. Hey—where you going?”

“Home.”

“No, you ain’t. You comin’ with me. I gotta gig down here on Eleven Street, in…” He glances at his wristwatch. “In three minutes. And I need a piano player.” He pronounces it “pianner,” in the old New York style, and grins when he says the word. “Who says they ain’t a god? You come out of the subway, and there’s the pianner player.”

“Hell, Bobby, I can’t play with you guys, no rehearsal, no—”

“Come on. It’s just you, me, and a bass player. Some kid from Juilliard. We’ll play the old stuff. Nothin’ fancy.”

He grabs Cormac’s arm, leaning on him for support.

The place is called the Riff Club and fills an old dining room off the lobby of a small hotel. The operators of the club are experimenting with afternoon concerts on weekends, Simmons says, and about forty people are waiting when they arrive. At the back of the room there’s a bar and a dozen people with cigarettes sending a blue nicotine haze to the ceiling. Cormac smiles. The place is like five hundred other joints where he’s done time since the nights and days of Prohibition. The crowd is mixed. About half white, half black, half young, half old: a 200 percent saloon crowd. Cormac sees a few graying faces from vanished nights at the Vanguard and the Five Spot. Everybody is drinking.

They go into a small room to the side of the bar. The bass player looks at his watch as they enter. He’s dressed in a Brooks Brothers blazer, gray slacks, red tie; Cormac thinks he could easily pass for a banker.

“Cormac, this is Justin Gilbert, great bass player, outta Juilliard, just like Miles,” Simmons says. “Justin, this is Cormac O’Connor, our pianner player for today.”

“Where’s Artie?” the young bass player says.

“Called in wrecked,” Simmons says.

“Fuck,” Justin says, his annoyed face annoying Cormac. He’s twenty-two years old, Cormac thinks, and he acts like he’s Milt Hinton.

“Cormac played with me before,” Simmons says. “Before you were born, Justin. So relax, man.” He grins. “Jazz is the art of improvisation. Don’t they teach you that at Juilliard?”

The bass player sighs. “So what are we gonna play?”

“Duke.”

That’s the rehearsal. They walk out on stage, where Justin’s bass is already leaning against a stool and a boxy grand waits for Cormac. For a moment, Cormac is nervous. He doesn’t care about failing in front of the audience; he just doesn’t want to fail Bobby Simmons. He flexes his fingers. He gazes out at the smoky room and sits down. Then, very slowly, in a blues tempo, he plays an introduction to “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Baaah. Ba, bop, bim, baa bah… Justin waits; Simmons watches and listens. And then the release. Justin’s bass is deep and powerful, as steady as a heartbeat, and here comes Bobby Simmons, attacking the old melody, driving it hard, the notes flying over the piano and the bass, playing the Ellington tune as if nobody has ever played it before, while honoring it as an old New York anthem. The crowd erupts. They yell and stomp feet on the old hotel floor and cheer through the final ride.

Without a break, Cormac moves into “Sophisticated Lady,” slowing the mood into a smoky midnight sound, leaving space for Julian to bow his bass for a long solo, and then drives hard into “C Jam Blues.” Cormac feels released, sweat pouring from him, the past vanished, the morning gone from his brain, his fingers filled with joy.

Then, from the side, a tall black man, even older than Bobby Simmons, comes on stage, his fingers running over a Selmer tenor sax. A few voices shout in recognition from the crowd, and Cormac knows him too: Horse Campbell, an old Texas honker who played with Basie and Jay McShann, old whiskey prince, old lover of all the wrong women. Someone shouts from the dark, “Horse, let’s ride!”

“I heerd you was back,” he shouts to Bobby Simmons, “so I figured I’d come play!”

Simmons grins, Julian looks uneasy, and then Horse starts talking with his horn, challenging Simmons, waiting for the alto man’s reply. Like two men younger than Julian. And the crowd roars as the exchange goes back and forth, call and response, attack and counterattack, Cormac’s left hand synchronizing with Julian’s pounding bass. There’s a huge roar and people standing and even Julian smiles. Then, as if to prove he is no mere Texas honker, Horse starts a hurting, grieving version of “Mood Indigo,” and Bobby Simmons follows, as if saying, That ain’t all, my man, that ain’t all, I been hurtin’ too, a long gah-damned time. The hushed crowd doesn’t clink a glass. They stand again at the end.

Then Cormac plays the first bars of “Perdido” and Horse grins at him, and Simmons grins at Horse, and they go at each other, making fun of old Illinois Jacquet riffs and Flip Phillips riffs, taking the basic riff from twelve different angles, the exhilaration building, the crowd standing, the two old men now younger than anyone in the room.

And then the set is over. Bobby Simmons holds his horn out flat, one hand on the neck, the other on the bell, like a knight presenting a sword to a prince, and he bows to Horse Campbell, who returns the gesture, and then the two men hug. Simmons goes to the microphone.

“Folks, I want to introduce the band,” he says. “On pianner, Cormac O’Connor. Nice to meet you, Cormac. Cormac, this is Horse Campbell; Horse, this is Justin Gilbert. I’m Bobby Simmons…. Oh man, it’s good to be home in New Yawk.”

At the break between sets, Cormac hurries to the telephone and calls Delfina.

“You might want to come down here,” he says. “I’m playing piano in a band.”

“Are you drinking or something?”

“No, I mean it. We play again in twenty minutes.”

He tells her about meeting Bobby Simmons, gives her the address of the Riff Club, hangs up, turns away. He lights a cigarette. Justin Gilbert comes over to him.

“Listen, I’m sorry for acting like an asshole before,” he says. “You got some chops.”

“Thanks,” Cormac says. “I understand. It’s hard, a new guy, doesn’t know the book. I felt bad….”

“How come I never heard of you?”

“Nobody has,” Cormac says.

“Where’d you go to school?”

“Saloons.”

“Same as them,” Justin says, nodding at Simmons and Horse, who are up on stools at the bar, talking to fans, flirting with women.

“There’s worse places to learn things in,” Cormac says.

“I guess.”

They start the second set with “A Night in Tunisia,” and now Simmons and Horse exchange quotes from Bird and Diz, and the two of them step aside to give Justin a solo, which includes an homage to Charlie Mingus, the young man thanking his elders. Horse is soloing on “Gone with the Wind” when Delfina comes in.

Cormac sees her easing around the side of the large room. She’s wearing a black sweater and black slacks, and her skin glows. A few men and women turn to look at her, but only Cormac can see the spirals. He smiles as she sits at a table beside a pole, and her smile looks dazzling in return.

And then Bobby Simmons nods at Cormac to take his solo. He plunges into it, hugging the melody but playing changes on it too, and folding in a quote from “Manhattan” and then from “Oye Como Va” with his eyes on Delfina. She grins. A few people in the audience smile. And then he’s done, and the whole band now moves in a languid, bluesy manner to the end. There is one final tune: “Flying Home,” roaring and honking and blazing, and then the set is over. The room roars for more. The men bow and then hug. Even Justin Gilbert looks happy.

Cormac hurries to Delfina. She rises from her chair and throws her arms around him.

“Oye, como va yourself,” she says.

They go to Duane Street and make love at dusk and then order Chinese food, and eat, and talk, and make love again. She asks him to play for her. He presents her with a nocturne, as if it were a gift, and then, without singing, he plays the melody of the Fight Song, filling it with small variations on the tune, inserting the years before minstrel shows and ragtime and the twentieth century. She listens intently, curled like a cat in a chair. Finally he gives her his own version of “Oye Como Va,” mixing Tito Puente with Scott Joplin. She gets out of the chair and presses her breasts against his back.

105.

That night, he enters the Delfina Summer. She is the essential element, humid and loamy, with her long thin legs in odd contrast to the thick pliancy of her flesh. They meet without plans, without agendas. If he speaks about architecture, she counters with the language of flowers. Surely, she says, roses must whisper in words that are different from those of chrysanthemums. But trees, he says, are like buildings, rooted in earth, rising against blank skies. Trees provide shelter, the way buildings do. Some trees are brilliant with colors, he says, and others stark with abandonment and old age.

Yes, she says, I see what you mean. And stares for a beat at the abandonment in his face.

They keep a cool, respectful distance from each other too, which makes the moments of intimacy even more fevered. In between, it’s as if each were wary of domesticating the time they share. They have no compact, no agreement about rules. If they meet on Monday, they will not meet on Tuesday or Wednesday, unless some urgency grips her and she must see him. He has his friends, like Healey; she has hers, whose names and faces he does not know. What matters is what happens when they are together. The music of the present tense. They make love in the Studio, on the couch, on the bed, on the old model’s stand, in the jacuzzi, and once on top of the piano, giggling all the way. They make love in full morning light or in the luminous glow of towers; and once, in a rush, in the dusky woods near Grant’s Tomb. On some weekday nights, she sleeps with him, fresh clothes packed for an early-morning meeting at her job in the North Tower. She sleeps deeply, breathes shallowly, has a whisper of a sated snore; she is without need then for companion or accomplice, only warmth. In the morning, she never says goodbye. They speak little about the flesh and not at all about love, which Cormac thinks is why she is with him. After the first tentative weeks, they stop performing and shift into being. They dine together in restaurants, visit museums, go to see shows or movies, as he shows her a New York she has seldom seen. She comes to listen when he sits in with Bobby Simmons. He takes her to one breakfast with Healey, who approves of her in capital letters, while she says later that Healey should be committed. Eventually, on every day that they are together, and without concern for clocks, they make love. Life’s small dessert. Always in his place, never in hers. She makes clear without saying a word that she is entering his life but that he is not yet entering hers.

She reads the New York Times each morning now and has added the Wall Street Journal because of her new job, but she doesn’t dice up the newspapers for subject matter at dinner. The saga of the missing intern in Washington does interest her, with its script of younger woman and older man, and she wonders why the police don’t deal with the suspect congressman the way they would deal with a bodega owner in the Bronx. “He’d be in a cell long ago,” she says. “But hey, this is America, man….” She says she can’t look at the president on television because he reminds her of snotty rich kids she’d see in restaurants when she was at Hunter, sending back the wine. She wonders whether stem cell research can cure the woman in her building uptown who shakes with Parkinson’s. She wishes the navy would stop using Vieques for target practice, but the Middle East, where bombs are now exploding in pizza parlors, could be in a different solar system. “I just don’t get it,” she says. “It’s gotta be me.” Some people, she adds, are just driven crazy by God and there’s nothing that can be done. The election in Peru is good news for Reynoso & Ryan because they have some business in Lima, but in general politics, domestic or foreign, she finds an emptiness, a series of speeches and explosions. “How many of these god-damned politicians ever heard ‘Oye Como Va’?”

Sometimes she speaks of her job as if she’s witnessing a daily soap opera. She describes Reynoso, the flamboyant partner, and his vice president, Sarita, a Colombian who is twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier than Reynoso, and mad for the man. At least twice a day, she gives Delfina dirty looks, as if her blouse is too frail or her sweater too tight. “She’d like me better,” Delfina says, “if I dressed like a nun.” There are sixteen people working in the office and all of them wonder about Ryan, the permanently absent partner who is always calling in from distant hotel rooms. Reynoso jokes about deliveries from Bogotá or schemes for paying off union leaders in Yucatán. Delfina punctuates her accounts by saying that capitalism is a bitch. Then glides away into other realms.

“Do you believe in God?” Cormac asks her at a show of religious tapestries at the Metropolitan.

“I believe in gods,” she answers. “Plural.”

And that draws him closer to her, as a dozen gods move through him from the Irish mist, and he wonders if they could ever merge with the sun-soaked gods of the Caribbean. There could be a tapestry of gods as profuse as flowers.

They talk about monotheism, and how it has led to so many slaughters. He wonders out loud why that single God is always so cruel.

“Because he wants love, man,” she says, “and he can’t get it. Look at all the commandments. They all say, Love me or die. What a weird message! God insists that you love him. He says, If you don’t love me, I’ll punish you with boils and plagues and locusts. I will burn you in Hell. His vanity is endless. Love me, he says, love me, love me, love me. He’s supposed to be the most powerful dude in the universe, El Señor, the Father of us all, and he comes across as a huge pain in the ass.”

She laughs when she says these things, which means she is serious.

“Hey, why can’t he be indifferent?” she goes on. “Why does he give such a big rat’s ass about getting people to love him? He’s like some kind of rapper. You know, Love me, baby, or I’ll throw you under a truck.”

Cormac smiles.

“I mean, the real gods are not so jealous, man, not so vain,” she says. “They have weaknesses, like everybody else. And they have real jobs. They have to take care of water and fire and the sky and the stars. Some of them have powers, but not all powers. Not everything wrapped up in one vain dude. I mean, they’re too busy, man, to demand love from each and every person on the planet…. They got the whole damn universe to take care of.”

And then she smiles in a secret way.

She can change the subject so effortlessly that he often doesn’t notice until later that she has moved on. She’s like a musician, hearing some riff and then doing variations on the theme, or introducing some completely new idea, while never going out of tempo, out of time. The macho vanity of God can lead to a discussion of the New Testament as poetry, an epic poem about a young man who thinks he is God too, and then ends up on a cross and discovers that he’s just a man, that he’s not God at all, that he will die for his delusion (and his vanity); which is why he says, God, why hast thou forsaken me?

And then she goes on to discuss poets, to talk about Rubén Darío and Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, all of whom she has read in Spanish, some of whom she has memorized. Such talk comes like a river that has been blocked for too many years, halted when she left Hunter, halted by marriage, a child, death, anguish; and he is thrilled when she speaks Spanish, when she drops a bucket into deep waters and draws a dozen lines of poetry from her bottomless well of vowels.

She is sometimes baffled by him. One sweltering Saturday, she wants to show him Orchard Beach, along the shores of the Bronx, where conga players drum into the night. “You gotta hear these guys, Cormac,” she says. “They’ll shake up your gonads.” He can’t go, and can’t explain why. She wants to see a show at the Brooklyn Museum. He’s busy, and she goes alone. She arrives one evening with CDs from J&R Music by Benny More and Tito Rodriguez. She plays them and begins to dance while he sits and watches, shouting, “Come on, man, you can’t hear this music and sit.”

And he gets up, clumpy, stiff, awkward, and she laughs and says, “Man, you’re gonna be a project! We gotta go to Jimmy’s, up in the Bronx! Right now, Cormac! Get dressed!”

And he says, “Uh, no, well, I, why don’t we try that some other time?”

And plays piano along with the Latin CDs. While Delfina dances alone.

But she is revealing herself in fragments, and so is he. They are like two archaeologists, examining unearthed shards and trying to make them whole through imagination. When he’s alone, longing for her abundant presence, he speaks to her in the emptiness: “To tell the truth, Delfina, my life has no shape at all. There are no straight lines. I have this strange life, but it’s not, in the end, strange at all. There is no plot. There is only luck and chance.”

106.

The Delfina Summer was not a neat sequence of day following night following day. Her part of the summer was condensed, edited together in his mind by his need for a story. But he still took his naps and went for his walks. He made entries in his notebooks. He listened to Ben Webster and Sinatra, Coltrane and Miles. He felt a need to read again the books that had enriched his life, and so he took down Don Quixote and read it in three days, and was filled with sadness. “Don’t listen to them, old knight,” he said to the emptiness. “They are not windmills. They are dragons.” And wondered what Quixote would make of the Woolworth Building and the Twin Towers. He laughed through Dante’s Inferno, imagining John Gotti leaning over the poet’s shoulder in his northern exile, saying, Da lawyizz. Put in about da lawyizz! He wanted to stand in applause for the shamelessness of Bleak House, the sight of Dickens demanding from his audience what Fosse used to call a Big Mitt Number. At one point Dickens has a man die of spontaneous combustion, exploding into fragments, into ash and dust. Sinvergüenza, he said. Shameless. And as delicious as a great extravagant meal.

And through the Delfina Summer, he still sat each Tuesday morning with Healey in Mary’s marvelous coffee shop, the city gilded with July or August, and heard his tale of a possible Hollywood miracle, and how the fabulous goniff Legs Brookner, for reasons of guilt or avarice, was offering him a twenty-thousand-dollar advance to turn his second play into a screenplay. “He’s gonna make me SOMEBODY again! Can you imagine?” Cormac could imagine, and they talked about ways to update the old play, or whether it should be done as a period piece, and what Healey would do with the immense fortune that might be coming his way. “Maybe I’ll move to Kabul and watch the Taliban shoot statues!”

One Tuesday morning, Healey walked in waving the Daily News. “Did you see THIS? The FBI just discovered that someone robbed four hundred and forty-nine guns from FBI headquarters, and one hundred and eighty-four laptops! One of the laptops has CLASSIFIED information on it! Is this the GREATEST? I mean, I LOVE this country! If you gotta have the secret police, then make sure they are INCOMPETENT!”

Cormac also saw Elizabeth Warren.

They meet twice for lunch, each time in a hotel. Each time she is in town from Southampton on a shopping trip, or to see friends from Europe. The first meeting is in the Grand in Soho, sandwiches in the restaurant, where she nods at acquaintances, and talks about politics and Africa and the forgiveness of debt. That day she sounds like a one-woman seminar and never once mentions what she really wants from him. Three weeks later, it’s room service at the Millennium, facing the World Trade Center across Church Street. She talks about Downtown as if it were another country, and he tells her some of its history, and who lived where, and how Matthew Brady had two separate studios on Broadway where he photographed everybody from Walt Whitman to Abraham Lincoln. He talks to delay; she listens but doesn’t listen. He hopes he is boring. And feels as if he is doing an audition.

She needs him in some way that she has not spelled out. He needs her to get to his father’s sword, and to the places that the sword will take him. In a room on a high floor of the Millennium, they make love. She is awkward, in the way that some models are permanently awkward, as if thrown back to the gawky, breastless girls they once were, when no boys could see beyond the braces glittering in their mouths. She wears her passion as if it were rouge.

“You’re what I thought you’d be,” she says when they are done. “Just marvelous.”

He thinks of Delfina, who never gives him a review. She is out there beyond the window of the hotel, across the plaza, on the eighty-fourth floor of the North Tower. He wishes he could enter the air, do some marvelous dance high above the city, as light and graceful as Fred Astaire. Dance for Delfina. Dance to her. And let the harbor winds cleanse his shame.

In the neutral space of the hotel room, Elizabeth Warren talks about schedules and assignments and duties, about a trip to Angola and Rwanda with a land mine committee, and how she needs shots for malaria. She talks about some fund-raising events in the Hamptons, talking as if she has endless time before she gets around to telling Cormac what she wants. Her summer is a schedule, rigorously shaped, not a life. He doesn’t say anything about what he wants from her: the sword. She smiles in a cool way, assembles her few things, checks her hair, and then goes. Cormac lights a cigarette and gazes off at the towers. “Mea culpa,” he says out loud. “Mea maxima culpa.”

Delfina calls before daylight on a morning in the third week of August. Her voice is quick, almost abrupt, and thin with tension.

“I’m on my way to the D.R.,” she says. “My father’s dying.”

She has seldom mentioned him in their time together. He was, she said once, handsome. At least in her small-girl’s memory. He played piano in various bands around Santo Domingo. “He’s not as good as you are,” she said, and smiled. He was married at least twice after her mother left him for the healing snows of New York.

“I don’t even know him,” she says. “That’s why I have to go. To ask him some questions.”

Something dark and uneasy is in her voice, and she knows it.

“My aunt Lourdes called around midnight,” she says, forcing herself out of the darkness. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Where are you now?”

“Kennedy. I wish you were with me.”

“Me too.” He pauses. “Call me when you get time,” Cormac says. “Call collect. But only if you can.”

“I will.”

The hardness seeps out of her voice now. He can hear the blur of public announcements in the background.

“I hope all goes well. For you. For him too.”

“I hope so too. For him. You always think you have all the time in the world to find out the things that really matter to you. Then you get a phone call in the middle of the night, and you’re talking about days or hours. Life is weird, sometimes.”

“It sure is.”

“And Cormac? We’ll have dinner in my place as soon as I get back. For the first time…”

“Of course. Just do what you’ve got to do down there.”

“Okay.”

“Vaya con Dios.”

Then she’s gone. He lies on the couch for a while and then picks up the remote control and clicks on New York 1 for the time and weather. Temperatures in the high eighties. No wind. He needs to go out into the city. In August, he thinks, I can even wear shorts.

She doesn’t call that night, or the day after. And on the following morning, he walks down Broadway with Healey, who is unhappy in a new way. Without warning, Mary’s coffee shop has closed. The building is being rehabbed, with money obviously raised before the dot-com collapse. The pipes and planks of rigging climb three stories above the sidewalk, throwing the front of the coffee shop into darkness, and a team of Mexicans is adding one new floor of rigging to another. The interior of the coffee shop is dark. The Miss Subways posters are still there, but gone are all those waitresses who called them sweetheart in the New York mornings.

“They’re gonna take everything we love right out of the world, Cormac,” says Healey, his walk slower, his face rippling with emotion. “They’ll put a fucking Starbucks in here, wait and see. With waitresses right out of Area Code 800. Women from NOWHERE. Wactresses, waiting for the BIG BREAK, not waitresses.”

Their legs take them south, as if there were concentric rings of time and eventually they’ll find their way to 1947, when Mary’s opened, selling eggs and jelly doughnuts to politicians from City Hall. But it’s all Duane Reade and Staples and Gap, flying the flags of globalization. Stockbrokers move in urgent waves from the subways and PATH trains in the World Trade Center, crossing Church Street, heading for Wall, right up past Brooks Brothers, all of them carrying the Times or the Wall Street Journal, and briefcases full of anxiety. Healey and Cormac watch them as if they are part of a movie, and then wander toward the Twin Towers.

“If all these business guys are going to their offices,” Healey says, “there must be some room for US.” They turn at a sign marked Cortlandt Street, which is no longer a street but only a marker erected at the plaza. “I mean, there’s gotta be a COFFEE shop, where you can sit down, and make remarks.” Cormac thinks: I lived on this street once, and then they shoveled it into landfill. They find a door and descend on an escalator into the vast concourse of the underground mall, looking at the strained faces on the packed stairs of the up escalator.

Then, in the concourse, Cormac sees a woman he is certain is Delfina. Coming up out of the N&R trains. There are hundreds of people moving around one another, and he has only a glimpse. It’s her hair. Her skin color. His stomach flips. She’s here, not in the Dominican Republic. She made up a lie. He excuses himself to Healey, then hurries after the woman, calls, “Delfina.” The woman turns. It’s not Delfina.

He goes back to find Healey in the swirling morning crowds, standing in front of a Florsheim’s shoe store.

“What’s with YOU?”

“I thought she was someone else.”

“That Latin chick?” Healey says.

He looks at Cormac, who mumbles, and then he shakes his head and says, “Fucked up, man. Fucked up.”

107.

Now Cormac feels time expanding, contracting, then expanding once again. His narrative has stalled. Through the pages of the Light, he keeps track of the separate journeys of the Warrens, while Delfina is off on her own journey, about which nobody writes. Elizabeth is photographed in an African village, and then meeting with a U.N. investigator, and then at a hospital. Adopting a “letter to the reader” format not seen since the Hearsts abandoned New York in the 1960s, Warren writes his impressions of Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi, their concerns about the missile defense shield, about the threats of terrorism spreading from the streets of Tel Aviv to all of Europe, the problems of immigrants, or the need to create a humane form of globalization. Warren writes, or dictates, articles on peace in Northern Ireland and how it could be a model for peace in the Middle East, each article running with a photograph of Warren shaking hands with the leading politicians. The pieces are tedious, written in the flat prose of a ghostwriter, but from them Cormac knows where Willie Warren has been, if not where he is. He feels like a burglar from the 1950s, studying the society columns to find out whose apartments were empty on Park Avenue.

Delfina calls collect late in the evening of the second day after she leaves. The connection is bad, with gaps in words, and blurred by a parallel nonstop conversation in Spanish that he can hear from a separate line.

“I’ve been trying every which way to get a number for you,” he says, trying to be cheerful. “I even called Reynoso and Ryan, but Reynoso is out of town too.”

“I’m okay,” she says. “My aunt picked me up at the airport and got me here. It’s out in the boonies. I’m calling from a neighbor’s house.” Static and interference. Then: “My father’s still alive. But quién sabes, mi amor. Hey, I’ll try to find a better phone and call you tomorrow….”

She doesn’t call.

Elizabeth does. She’s back in town. Can he come to dinner?

108.

It’s the eve of the first weekend in September. On his Thursday walk, taken around noon, he sees the streets emptying, as the city evacuates for Labor Day. Buses groan uptown on Church Street, loaded with passengers for Staten Island and New Jersey. Taxis push their way to Penn Station, Grand Central, or the Port Authority bus terminal, and he sees men and women waiting on corners with black wheeled suitcases, waving frantically for someone, anyone, to stop and take them away.

Above him, the sky is tossing, the clouds scudding and turbulent before the power of an emptying wind. Down at the Battery clouds assemble into a white horse, complete with rider. He thinks: New York 1 should add an Omen Report. With a Portent Index. And a Death Chill Factor. He stares for a long while as the clouds unravel and blow to the east.

He naps and dreams great shuddering dreams that he can’t remember when he comes awake. Through the skylight, out past the towers, the clouds are now arranged like a stallion. The Black Horseman of famine. And then a shift of wind, and the dying sun colors the horseman red. The Red Horseman of war. Which then bleaches into the Pale Horseman of pestilence and death. Joined to the White Horseman of the afternoon, they warn of strange births and terrible deaths, ruinous storms, conflict and rage, the season of Apocalypse. Are they forming over New York for the first time, or were they drawn by Albrecht Dürer half a millennium ago? Yeats would have read those clouds.

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Which Bill Tweed would answer with another question: What are you gonna do about it?

He sees a light blinking on the answering machine. He plays the lone message.

“It’s me,” Delfina says, her voice wavering across the miles. “I had a terrible time getting through to you. Sorry, mi vida. Everything’s okay with me, but they don’t think my father can last the night. I’ll let you know as soon as I can come home. Check the e-mail too. Love ya.”

That’s all. The crisp message of someone using someone else’s telephone, at long-distance rates. A voice that’s at once concrete and vague, but alive.

And then he feels a green worm move in his heart. Suppose this is a game? Suppose she is lying? Suppose she never left New York? Just because the woman in the Trade Center concourse was not Delfina, that doesn’t mean she’s not somewhere else in the city. He calls her number. In English and Spanish, she says she has gone on a short trip out of town, on family business, and should be home by Labor Day, please leave a message. Cormac relaxes and curses himself for an adolescent fool. But the worm still gnaws. He glances at the clock. Almost six. He calls her office and asks for Mr. Reynoso. “Sorry, he’s out of town until after Labor Day. Would you like to leave a message?” No, he says, I’ll call after the holiday.

He checks e-mail, but there are no messages from Delfina, and he thinks: I’d better read Stendhal tonight. I’m too old for this shit.

109.

The doorman looks at Cormac as if he’s a jewel thief. Standing in the vestibule, the doorman is like a remnant of the Hapsburg Empire, all gold braid and buttons on a field of royal blue, and in the great tradition of doormen, he has adopted the haughty manners of his masters. He fixes his hooded eyes on Cormac while he calls the penthouse. The clock behind him says 8:15. Back turned, he murmurs into the house phone, then hangs up.

“Penthouse,” he says. “Take a right to the elevator.”

“Thanks.”

Cormac is carrying a draftsman’s case, purchased from Pearl’s Paint on Lispenard Street, and the man in the elevator looks at the case first, then at Cormac. If he suspects the case hides a shotgun, he says nothing. He punches PH. Up they go in silence. Cormac flashes on Delfina, in a Caribbean town he will never see. He hears the disappointment in her recorded voice, and the sound of hard rain. Now he feels for a quick beat that he’s once more betraying her. He tells himself, I imagine her betrayal while I enact my own.

The elevator stops, the door opens and Elizabeth Warren is smiling at him.

“Come in, come in,” she says, full of practiced brightness and formality, played for the elevator operator. The door clicks shut behind him and he stands the draftsman’s case against a small table, which also holds a bowl of keys.

“Is there a rifle in that thing?” she says, smiling.

“Not even a round of ammunition. I promised a friend I’d loan it to him. He’s an artist, lives over on Second Avenue.”

“Is he any good?”

“Not bad.”

They walk down the hall, past the many cream-colored doors, including the room where the swords hang together on a wall.

“Patrick arranged some soup for us, and sandwiches,” she says. “We almost never eat heavy in the evenings, except when William is entertaining. He’ll be gone a few more days in Israel, getting a tour of the terrorist outposts.” She says this with a certain sarcasm. “Patrick has tickets to a baseball game—and the maids are off tonight.”

Ground rules established firmly and casually, she gestures at a small table in the corner: soup bowls, silverware, a silver tureen for the soup. Sandwiches neatly piled on a plate, the crusts pared from the bread.

“I told you we’d have to rough it,” she says. She’s wearing a loose, flowing Mexican skirt, white peasant blouse, low shoes: a Frida Kahlo sketch for someone other than Frida Kahlo.

“It looks perfect,” Cormac says.

“Let’s sit before the soup goes cold.”

She talks about Israel, and how Willie actually admires Ariel Sharon and hopes to urge him to meet with Arafat; and how depressed she was about the scattered killings in Northern Ireland; and quotes the old line about how peace comes dropping slow. The land mine problem is urgent. “There are children dying all over the world,” she says. “In Afghanistan there are two million buried mines, and the Russians have been gone for twelve years.” The problem, she says, is the idiots from the Taliban. Has he seen the footage of the way they destroyed the two immense statues of Buddha? Dreadful, dreadful. Then she switches to national politics and the economy, the president and his men, the ripple effect of the economic collapse on Mexico and England, and eventually the world. Speaking with intelligence and a certain journalistic precision. Cormac feels sludge seeping into his brain.

The soup is a variation on sopa de tortilla, without the avocados or the chicharrón. At least one of the cooks must be Mexican. The sandwiches are tomato and mozzarella, almost certainly the reduced-fat variation of the cheese. Elizabeth places herself so that the lamplight emphasizes her cheekbones and the elegant column of her neck.

“I told my husband you were coming here tonight,” she says. “Just so you don’t feel strange when you see him next.”

“Any objections?”

“No. He said to tell you that they could use Major Deegan in Tel Aviv.”

She smiles, and they are into the dance. Cormac knows all the patterns, far better than Elizabeth does, but the steps are always slightly different. Here Yo-Yo Ma plays cello on a CD full of the tango. He sees what she doesn’t: Valentino and George Raft and the hoarse cigarette voice of Agustín Lara at an upright piano. His eyes roam over the paintings. He loosens his tie. She holds his hand. The CD ends. A moment of silence.

“Come,” she says.

Later, in a small dim room behind her office, she falls limp and soft and silent for a long while.

“Were you thinking of someone else?” she says.

“Yes,” he says, telling her the truth.

“Poor woman,” she says, with a hint of bitterness. “To have missed this.”

“Who were you thinking about?”

“My husband.”

This is a new step in the ancient dance.

“I love him,” she says. “I want to be with him the rest of my life.”

“Tell me the ‘but.’ ”

She smiles and turns her head to the wallpaper.

“I’d rather not.”

He sits up. She follows, back against a bare wall, knees drawn up. Her face now is exhausted and drained, her hair blowsy.

“I have a question,” he says.

“Ask it.”

“What do you want from me?”

She’s quiet for a long moment, sorting out words, staring at her long fingers as they form a little steeple. There’s a twitch in her cheeks.

“Intimacy, I suppose.”

The word breaks something in her. She starts to weep. Her hands fall hopelessly to the bed, her knees move toward Cormac, her porcelain shell cracks. He feels pity make its treacherous entrance. He holds her tight for a long time, and she dozes, as he eases away from her, and then she falls into sleep. He lets her thin body relax into the pillow. He covers her with a down comforter and lifts hair from her brow. Intimacy. Another one of those big words that James Joyce said always get us in so much trouble.

The night man is on the door when Cormac comes down at twenty minutes after twelve and says good night in a firm voice. The night man nods in an uncertain way, and Cormac keeps walking with the draftsman’s case in his hand, heavier now than when he arrived. He strolls into the chilly blue air.

He crosses to the park side, walking south, once more in possession of the sword but robbed of elation by what he did to get it. He thinks: I should be rushing home, to examine this old weapon in all of its details, to feels its old power. But I don’t want to go home. Not yet. I want to walk off the details of this night. The mixture of shame, pity, and treachery. To shove them, as I’ve shoved so many other things, into the past. Then he tells himself that such matters must recede before the demands of the old vows. “Now I have the sword,” he says out loud. And then, to himself, Delfina exists for me, as vivid as dawn. If I can join those narratives, I’ll be free. May all gods grant me benediction.

A cold wind blows from the west, and he wishes Delfina were waiting for him on Duane Street instead of brooding on death and fathers under the forest rains of the Dominican Republic. Wind-dried leaves rattle down from the trees of the park, the autumnal sound denser in the darkness that lies beyond the low stone walls. Taxis move downtown on Fifth Avenue. The cased sword feels heavier, his body more weary. He goes to the curb, hails a taxi, and gets in. He names his destination for the Pakistani driver. Then sits back, the sword in its case on his lap. The window to his left is open to the night air.

He watches pedestrians walking in couples along Fifth Avenue, and the glittering blur up ahead, and the lights very bright on the Empire State Building.

The taxi stops for a light at Fifty-ninth Street, with the Sherry-Netherland to his left. Then a figure draws up beside the taxi. A black bicycle rider. His head bare, gazing off to the left. The head turns. The black man smiles.

“Hello, Cor-mac,” he says.

It’s Kongo.

“See you soon,” he says in Yoruba. And then turns the ten-speed against west-bound traffic into a side street where the taxi cannot follow.

“Kongo!” Cormac calls after him. “Stop, Kongo! Wait!”

He starts to thrust money at the taxi driver, to open the door. But Kongo has vanished into the night.

110.

Across the day, Cormac polishes the sword. He uses sandpaper and emery cloth and a burin to pry time’s corrosion out of the etched spirals. He oils the steel. He sands again. On the CD player, he listens to Ben Webster and Duke Ellington, trying to bring their love and polish to his task. The phone call he wants to receive does not come. He takes a break, laying the sword on a towel, and goes out into the emptied streets.

He spends an hour at J&R Music World, buying a cell phone, asking a surly clerk to explain its workings. Later, he can add its number to the message on the answering machine, so that Delfina can find him if he’s out. He sits for a shoe shine in the almost empty concourse under the towers, glancing at the tabloids, speaking Spanish with the bootblack, all about how the Yankees are sure to win, then wondering to himself how many pairs of shoes he has worn across the years. Six hundred pairs? A thousand? He remembers the time when all shoes had the same shape, blunt, rough, all-purpose boots, until some ingenious cobbler changed everything by designing shoes for the left and the right foot. And how many pairs of new socks has he pulled over his wide Irish feet and then thrown out as rags?

He walks north on Church Street, and at Chambers Street turns right to a barbershop. Two barbers. No customers. He asks for a trim, and the questions come again in his head: How many pounds of hair have been trimmed from my head? Thousands? More? The barber is seventy-two years old and from Cuba. His name is Albor, and he has been cutting hair, he says, since he was seventeen. Cormac asks how many tons of hair he has chopped off human heads and chins. He laughs out loud. “I star’ thinkin’ abou’ things like that, ’mano,” he says, “I go nuts.”

In the afternoon, Cormac plays piano for an hour, noodling Ellington, playing a jokey piece of Satie. His fingers feel oiled from use. Then he works again on the sword, smoothing pitted steel, using steel wool now, digging gently, running fingertips over the blade. On the day he took the sword, he saw Kongo. All streams converge in one river. Now he traces the spirals, thinking of Delfina. With her spirals, she is never nude. Two paintings of her are upstairs in the studio, one with spirals, one without; she asked for the painting without the tattooed markings. “I want to see what I used to look like,” she said. He has the paintings, but she remains somewhere in the Dominican Republic. Call me, mujer. Call now. Call tonight. Call soon. Call.

He carries the sword to the Studio, lays it on the low table beside the couch. He gazes at the two portraits of Delfina, thinking: If I have time, I can fix the eyelashes. I can make her painted flesh seem to breathe. I can make a viewer hear her voice.

He thinks about Kongo, out there in the city. Visiting from the eighteenth century. He sleeps. And dreams of Willie Mays, racing in the outfield grass of the Polo Grounds, his back to Cormac, his back to Jimmy Walker, home from European exile, sitting beside Cormac in a box, the three of them blended in the timelessness of dream. Willie’s back is to the world, running and running and running. The centerfield wall keeps receding. And Willie Mays runs toward eternity.

When he awakes, the Studio is dark. The towers glitter against a mauve sky. He lies there for a long moment, and then sees the room fill with versions of himself: shadowy figures, faces barely visible but all looking like his own. He is bearded and he is clean-shaven, he wears waxed mustaches or long sideburns, his hair is down to his shoulders, or cut to a balding pate: the disguises of a shadowy man. He wears the suit made for him on the Fury by Mr. Partridge, and the rough clothes he wore laying cobblestones or digging the subway or catching rivets high on the Woolworth Building. There he is in the worsted suit he wore for two decades while working at the Herald. There he is in a suit and vest he wore to so many other newspapers. There he is in a blacksmith’s leather apron and a painter’s smock. One of him wears a Five Points derby and another a hoodlum’s stovepipe hat, a plain cloth cap or a thirties gray fedora. All the Cormac O’Connors stare at him, and at the object gleaming on the low table.

The sword.

The sword glows now in the dimness, as if soaking up all the free-floating illumination of the city. It points north.

He reaches for the sword. Grips it. And all the versions of himself vanish.

He steps into the dark open space, plants his feet, then thrusts with the sword. Then cuts back with the sword. Then slashes with the sword. And then does it again, faster. And then faster. Feeling the power surging through his arm. Surging to his shoulder. Surging through his heart and guts.

On his evening walk, he searches the blank streets for Kongo but does not find him. He feels observed, as if the windows with their closed shades are watching him and tracking his movements. Did Wordsworth feel observed by trees and meadows? He pauses for a stoplight and laughs. Is anyone else in this city thinking at this moment of William Wordsworth? Maybe. Up near Columbia, in housing provided to faculty by the university. Somewhere in the city, almost every subject is being pondered by someone.

He sees a young Muslim woman in black, her head covered and her handsome face bared, crossing Astor Place, passing the liquor store, heading west toward NYU. How did she find her way here? Where is her family? What language does she dream in?

Cormac dreams sometimes in Irish, and in Yoruba, and in German or Yiddish. He thinks: Dead languages live in my head at all hours. He walks north on Fourth Avenue, remembering vanished bookstores, and the many volumes he discovered in their dusty bins, books that are now on the shelves of Duane Street. He flashes on Cicero’s Murder Trials, describing the stuff of tabloids in elegant Latin. And then thinking: I must make a will.

He passes a synagogue and remembers the way he has memorialized his mother’s death every fifty years. On January 17, 1737, the day she fell into Irish mud under the black coach. Across his American years, he has visited synagogues to bond himself forever to her and to Noah’s lost daughters. In all those years, he was a man without faith in a single God, blind to the Torah, filled with Celtic mists and Celtic goddesses. But still he retreated to those ever-larger rooms, to the places of her secret faith, in which he whispered kaddish. In 1787, and in 1837, and in 1887, and in 1937, and in 1987. Every fifty years. Not world enough, but with more time than most other men. Whispered her name in Hebrew, learned slowly from one old Brazilian rabbi. Whispered prayers in bookish Yiddish, absorbed from the exiled socialists of Kleindeutschland. Yiddish was one of the secret rivers of blood and history. And each time he prayed, he yearned for a cloak of many colors.

Here where Kongo has arrived at last to be his Virgil, to lead him to the secret city of emerald light.

For the first time in many years, he doesn’t want to go.

111.

On the morning of Labor Day, he uses the cell phone to call Healey.

“Where ARE you?” Healey shouts. “In Central Booking?”

Cormac explains that he’s on a bench in City Hall Park, facing the Woolworth Building. That accounts for the background noise.

“You mean you GOT one? You got one of those goddamned YELL phones?”

“Guilty with an explanation,” Cormac says. “As with everything in this life. A Labor Day sale at J and R…”

“I don’t want to HEAR it! What about lunch, comrade?”

They meet in a coffee shop on Twenty-third Street off Seventh Avenue and sit in a booth in the back, engulfed by orange plastic. The Greek owners and waiters all know Healey, and laugh with him as his voice booms around the place.

“They like me ’cause I speak Greek with them,” he says. “In the second year at my high school, the Jesuits offered me a choice: Greek or German. Along with four years of Latin. I took Greek instead of German because I hated the fucking NAZIS, little knowing that I’d end up working with them in the theater.”

But he’s happy about other things. The check from Legs Brookner actually cleared at the bank. The producer is off in the south of France, and they will meet again in two weeks.

“It’s a SCORE. Any Hollywood score is a good score. Just as long as they never make the MOVIE!”

The word “movie” makes heads turn in three booths jammed with unemployed dot-commers. For years, most young people told you they were working on movie scripts. Then they talked about start-ups. Now they are back to movie scripts.

“Don’t think about it!” Healey yells at the young people. “Movies are the worst work in the world. I mean, there’s a movie playing down the block that’s all about FARTS! Learn honest trades. Be carpenters. Repair plumbing. Take the FIREMAN’S test! Be HAPPY!”

The three booths break into applause. Healey gives Cormac a look that says: Am I nuts or are they?

The e-mail is waiting when Cormac gets home. From Delfina. Across the miles.Cormac, querido: I’m writing this in a cyber cafe. I’ve been upset since talking to you—upset with myself, not with you—and now I want to talk some truth. About me. And about us. I felt in your voice that you were jealous somehow, maybe about Mr. Reynoso. The truth is that my father was really dying, and is now dead. But the truth gets more complicated. When I went to see Mr. Reynoso to get some time off, he was very understanding. Not only did he give me the time I needed, he paid for the round-trip ticket to Santo Domingo. I wanted you to come but somehow I knew you couldn’t. I mean, you can’t even go to Brooklyn. So I went to the airport alone, in a car service from East Harlem. When I got there, who’s in first class? Mr. Reynoso. When I see him, I’m irritated. This was, like, too neat, too easy. He said he had some business in Santo Domingo, that this was a real coincidence, etc. I thought, Man, you’re so full of shit. But once we got there, he was a model citizen. A car was waiting, and after he got off at his hotel, he sent the car off to the hills with me in it, to go to my aunt Lourdes’s house. A day passed, then another, as I meet all my endless relatives and my father is lying there in the hospital. On the third night, I come to the hospital, and Mr. Reynoso is there. He’s checking up on the nurses, the doctors, the care, making sure money isn’t the problem. He was doing this very low-key, not playing a big shot. I was touched. When he asked me to go to dinner, I said yes. That was a mistake. You know how it goes. One thing led to another. I slept with him in his suite at the hotel, and cried all the way home in the limo. I cried over my own weakness. I cried for you. Or to say it more clearly, I cried for us. Until coming here, I had this idea in my head, you know, not spelled out, not anything I could say to you, but there—that we might be together for a long time. And yet that night I knew I couldn’t tell you the truth about what happened with Mr. Reynoso. You might never trust me again. You might think of me as a weak and trivial person. You might throw up your hands and take a walk. But I also knew something else. There are things about me you don’t know. Some of them are very important. I keep them hidden, because I don’t know how you would react to them. I’m not ashamed of them. I just don’t know if you—if anyone—could understand them. This trip has reminded me that the two of us just might not be a true fit. I don’t know, even now, sitting in this fucking cyber cafe at 10:30 on a Saturday night. I do want to be with you. Forever. When I get home, I’ll try to explain everything. All about who I really am. And maybe for once, you’ll tell me about yourself. Then we can decide. If it’s good-bye, I understand. With all my love, Delfina

Cormac prints out the letter, reads it again, full of a deep, aching sadness. He walks around the rooms, looking at the places where she has been with him, at tables, in bed, on the model’s stand, along the packed shelves of books, in the kitchen. He sees her peering into the refrigerator that first night, trying to read his character from juice and water and fruit. And then thinks: Jesus Christ, I love her.

He sits down and writes a reply to her e-mail address, hoping she’ll open it somehow and somewhere.Delfina, mi amor. Received your letter and want you more than ever. Let me know when you are coming back. Bring clothes and appetite, and we’ll talk for as long as we need. Much love, C

He speaks out loud in a voice full of amazement and sorrow.

“I love her,” he says. “I love her.”

112.

Tuesday, and a sense of imminence in the air. The sky is gray and bleak. In the streets, there are a few lonesome joggers and dog walkers, engulfed in solitude. Cormac walks to the Battery and back, nodding at the firemen in their ancient house on Liberty Street, passing the old New York Post building on West Street where he worked his last shifts on night rewrite. It’s a condo now, filled with young businesspeople and students from NYU.

At the Battery, whitecaps rise on the surly harbor. A freighter plods toward the Atlantic. Seagulls move in widening arcs. The sky is a smear, vacant of horsemen. He hears the voice of Mary Morrigan: Something bad is coming.

He writes a will. He types a long detailed note to Delfina explaining which books and paintings are valuable. He gives her the name of his lawyer. He explains how to sell what she doesn’t want. The note becomes a letter of thirty-six pages. On Tuesday, he goes to the lawyer’s office near Foley Square, signs the will, and has the letter attached and sealed, as a kind of codicil.

While copies are being made, Cormac gazes out the window of the lawyer’s office. Down on the sidewalk, dressed in black, his arms folded across his chest, is Kongo. He doesn’t even try to open the window.

Delfina calls from the airport around eight o’clock on Wednesday night. She sounds drained.

“I want to come to your house,” she says. “But it’s been a long day. I’m tired and dirty and—”

“Tomorrow night is fine.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then come to my house tomorrow night,” she says. “I brought some things from the D.R.”

“Great.”

“And Cormac? Thanks for that e-mail. I know I’m a god-damned fool for telling you anything, but it made me feel better.”

He hears his voice lower. “It’s great to hear your voice.”

A pause. “Yours too.”

Twenty minutes later, there’s another call. Elizabeth Warren. Cool, but not cold. She tells him she’s in Ottawa at a three-day conference.

“But that’s not why I called,” she says, her voice rising into anger. “I called to tell you what you already know. You’re a god-damned thief.”

“Let me explain—”

“What can you explain? You’re a thief, Cormac. My husband comes home this weekend and I want that sword back on its hook!”

“I’ll bring it to Willie myself.”

“That’s no good.”

A wire of hysteria enters her voice.

“My husband owns that sword!”

He lowers his own voice, thinking: Don’t argue.

“Elizabeth, those spirals were cut into that blade by my own flesh and blood, back in Ireland,” Cormac says. “More than two hundred and fifty years ago. I’ve been looking for it a long time now….”

“Please, no fairy tales.”

“I’ve been cleaning it, polishing it.”

“It’s not your property. It’s Willie’s.”

“I know, and I’ll return it to him when—”

He hears a sob.

“How could you have done that to me the other night?” A pause. “I trusted you.” A longer pause. “I—I said things I would never say to—”

“I know.”

“I wanted one simple thing from you. Intimacy. Just that, just simple intimacy, some hope that for an hour or a minute, we—” She stops. “And all you had in mind was theft.”

She’s right, of course, but he can’t explain. He thinks: I can’t explain almost anything.

“I’ll call you when I get back,” she says. “If you don’t bring the sword, I’ll call the police.”

“And the police will call Page Six.”

“You’re a terrible man,” she says.

“I probably am.”

Hunger eats at him now. He feels some remorse for what he has done to Elizabeth Warren, imagines her alone in a hotel room in Canada, imagines her own hunger. He wonders too about Delfina, and whether she was truly so exhausted that she needed a night alone, or whether she has gone somehow to Reynoso’s apartment, wherever it is, to perform a proper farewell. The green worm will not leave. In the morning, she will be back at her office on the eighty-fourth floor, performing distance and neutrality. And Cormac thinks: Doubt, once felt, never goes away.

He decides to go out to eat, to escape the house. He brings a copy of The Decameron with him, to read at a restaurant table, and breathes deeply of the cool September wind. He walks uptown on Church Street, then cuts over to Varick. The night is damp and warm. SUVs are pulling up to the converted factories of Tribeca, depositing children, dogs, tennis rackets, and worried young couples on the sidewalks. The end of the prolonged Labor Day weekend, two days added to the usual three, or two free days that come with unemployment. The restaurants are filling up, their interiors warm with yellow light. He crosses to Murphy’s at North Moore. Away to the south, the Twin Towers are blazing with light, the offices busy with all those people from Japan and England and Canada and India who don’t add extra days to the Labor Day weekend. He can’t pick out the eighty-fourth floor.

In the bar side of Murphy’s, just inside the front door, a Yankee game plays on the television set over the long polished bar, and the Met game is on the set beside the men’s room. Cormac likes the place, with its mixture of teamsters, telephone workers, defense attorneys, and artists. Every high-backed stool is full, and at the tables people are talking, laughing, yelling into cell phones. All of them are smoking. He wants to smoke too, and decides to wait at the bar until a table is free; two groups are already drinking coffee. The bar is all dark wood and mirrors and a tiled floor out of the twenties, like a painting by John Sloan. Guinness and Harp flow from copper taps. On each table there’s a red carnation in a cut-glass vase. Cormac enjoys the place after the lunch hour, when most people have returned to work and he can read a newspaper in the emptiness and doodle with a crayon on the white paper table coverings. He lights a cigarette, then reaches between two men on stools and orders a Diet Coke. The bartender gives him change from a five-dollar bill. A heavyset man in a denim shirt turns a flushed face to Cormac.

“That shit rots your teeth,” he says, a curl of belligerence in his voice.

“Only if you drink more than one a day.”

“That right?”

“I read it in the Post. It must be true.”

“Are you puttin’ me on?”

“Why would I do that?”

“You got the kind of face, you like puttin’ people on.”

Ah, Christ, one of these people. Looking for trouble. One of the ten thousand others Cormac has met across the years.

“I never realized that about my face,” he says. Saying to himself: Stop. Watch the ball game. He glances at himself in the mirror. “Looks just like another face to me.”

“Yeah—and I’d like to smash it in for you.”

The bartender, sad and somber, leans in.

“Cool it, Frankie.”

“Guy says he read in the Post, your teeth only rot if you drink more than one Diet Coke a day.”

“So?”

“It’s the way he said it.”

“And?”

“I want to smash his face in.”

“Cool it, Frankie.”

Frankie looks at Cormac again. He has a mean, dead look in his eyes, and purses his lips as if savoring the moment.

“Fuckin’ wiseass.”

“Sorry,” Cormac says, sipping the Diet Coke. Now the owner comes over, a stocky Irish American in his forties. A few people at the tables are looking at them, ignoring the ball games and the jokes. Cormac can hear Tim McCarver’s voice analyzing the Yankee game.

“Frankie,” the owner says, “maybe you should walk around the block a couple a times. Go over the firehouse and bullshit awhile.”

“Yeah, after I cream this cocksucker.”

The owner turns to Cormac. “You sure set this idiot off, whatever the fuck you said.”

“All I said was—”

Frankie stands up, scraping his stool on the floor, puts his glass on the bar, and whirls. Cormac steps to the side, astonished that it’s come to this, and Frankie goes past him, landing on a table with a crash of glasses, ashtrays, plates, and a vase. A woman screams. Blood pumps from Frankie’s forehead. People look at Cormac, and he shrugs, raising his eyebrows in a stage version of bafflement. He thinks: This kind of trouble is all I need. Two waiters and the owner heave and haul, trying to get Frankie to his feet. Cormac steps into the small men’s room. When he returns, Frankie is holding a towel to his head, while the waiters walk him out the door.

“Jesus, what’d you hit him wit’?” says a plump dark-haired woman, her voice filled with awe. She’s wedged into a stool.

“Nothing,” Cormac says. “He swung and he missed.”

His hand trembles as he lights another cigarette. He realizes that he hasn’t had a fight in a saloon in almost sixty years. That is, since the week after Pearl Harbor. Fights in saloons end up in police stations, places he can’t afford to visit. He inhales deeply. The smoke is delicious. The bar turns noisy again, the broken glass swept up, the blood mopped away. The customers resume their noise. A cell phone rings, but it isn’t Cormac’s. The owner comes over.

“Sorry about that,” he says. “He’s usually pretty harmless, Frankie, as big as he is. Works for Verizon, loves the Mets. But he lost his wife, maybe six weeks now? Two months? Whatever. Anyways, he hasn’t been right in the head. They had no kids, except Frankie, and now he’s another lost soul. One of the guys is driving him to Saint Vincent’s.”

“Ah, shit,” Cormac says. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” the owner says. “You didn’t kill his wife. Life did. Hey, have one on me.”

“Thanks,” Cormac says, and gazes out the window.

Kongo is across the street. He nods, and Cormac leaves his change and hurries to the door.

113.

They embrace on the corner and start walking together toward the river. Kongo is wearing a zipper jacket and jeans, like a million other men in the autumnlike city. Silver is scratched into his hair, and there’s a melancholy look in his eyes. His grave voice is deeper, his accent more refined and English. They talk about how much the city has changed since they were young, how their small shared village became the metropolis. Cormac tells Kongo of the image he sometimes sees from the top of a skyscraper: a huge sculpture, thirteen miles long, two miles wide, the island of Manhattan being shaped by a restless unknown hand, a godlike artist who is never satisfied, forever adding elements here, erasing them there, lusting for perfection.

“On the final day,” Cormac says, “after due warning to the citizens, the god of New York will lift his creation into the sky. It will be thirteen miles high, its base in the harbor, the ultimate skyscraper.”

Kongo laughs.

“You could see that New York from Africa, Kongo.”

“I’ve never stopped seeing New York, Cor-mac.”

He doesn’t explain where he has been, nor does he ask Cormac about his own long life. Kongo inhales the odor of the unseen river, and mentions a river in Gabon that has the same mixture of river and ocean salt. “If you are wounded on its banks,” he says, “the salt will heal you.” Cormac talks about how he has read his way into Africa through a hundred books, absorbing the narrative of slavery and colonization and the bloody struggle of the twentieth century to be free at last; and how he used to listen to the memories of Africans in New York, and lived to see all memory, African, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish, English, all memory of injury and insult, all nostalgia for lost places and smashed families, all yearning for the past: saw all of it merge into New York.

“I see it every day,” Kongo says.

“It’s harder to see if you live it one year at a time,” Cormac says. “There’s too much of it. Too many faces, too many people, too many deaths and losses.”

Kongo looks at him. “I’m an old man too,” Kongo says. “Just like you. But one thing I’ve learned, after all the bloodshed and disease and horror: Forgetting is more important than remembering.”

“Yes,” Cormac says. “But memory goes on, Kongo. In the end, all men and women say the same thing: I was, therefore I am.”

They are at the river now, on a new path cut along the waterfront for joggers and bicycle riders. A pair of lovers huddle on a bench. A wino sleeps on another. There’s a bicycle chained to a tree. The river is a glossy ebony bar. Lights twinkle on the distant Jersey shore, close enough to touch, yet beyond distance.

“Your frontier,” Kongo says, and chuckles.

“Yes,” Cormac says. “The border.”

A small yacht moves south toward the harbor, lit up like a child’s toy.

“Well, you know why I’m here,” Kongo says.

“I think I do.”

Kongo leans on a rail, gazing at the darkness.

“You have the sword,” he says. “That allows you to settle the affair of your father, to bring it to an end.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve found the woman at last.”

“A wonderful woman.”

Kongo glances at him, as if trying to decode the sentence. And then goes on.

“When you’re finished with the affair of your family,” he says, “you must take her to the cave. To the cave where you were given your… gift.” He speaks like a commander issuing orders, glances at a clock on an old industrial building, then turns back to the river. “You will make love to her in the cave.” A pause. “And then you can cross over.”

His words are at once a promise and a sentence.

“I’ll help get you there,” he says. “You’ve got one week.”

They stand in silence for a long time. Then Kongo turns and walks toward the bicycle that is chained to a tree trunk. He turns a key in the lock.

“Wait, Kongo, don’t go yet.”

“I’m not going. I’ll be here in New York.”

“There are a hundred things I want to talk about with you,” Cormac says.

Kongo shrugs and exhales, as if there’s nothing at all he wants to discuss.

“How do I find you?” Cormac says.

“I’ll be around,” Kongo says in Yoruba. “Don’t worry.”

He smiles and swings onto the bicycle and pedals away to the north. From the blackness of the unceasing river, Cormac hears a foghorn.

I was, he thinks, therefore I am.

114.

There’s an e-mail waiting when he opens the computer the next morning. In this latest edition of the world, e-mail evades the overheard whisper, the visible evidence of flirtation, the eye of the private investigator. Combined with the cell phone, it makes cheating easier, and life more dangerous. Cormac: I’m at work, and still have a job. Que sorpresa! Can I come by around 12:15? Can’t wait for anything formal. Gotta see you. Love, D

He sends an e-mail back, saying twelve-fifteen is fine, and he’ll order sushi. He lights a cigarette, using a saucer for an ashtray.

She arrives at twelve-ten, breathless after walking from the office to Duane Street, a fine film of sweat on her skin. She’s smartly dressed in a navy blue business suit, smiling and radiant. Her skin is darker from the sun, and tinged with red. She kisses his cheeks and lips and neck, pushes her belly into his, grasping for buttons and belt. He lifts her out of her shoes. Her skirt falls, her jacket, blouse, and bra. They make writhing, gnashing love on the table. And then fall back into panting languor. They laugh, as if they’ve gotten away with something.

Then he turns, slides to the floor, goes to the kitchen, and takes the sushi and sashimi from the refrigerator.

Delfina vanishes into the bathroom with her clothes, washes quickly, combs her hair, dresses, returns to sit down to the platter of food, glancing at the clock. No review. No accounting either.

“Buenas tardes, mi amor,” she says, and smiles.

“Buenas tardes,” he says. Then adds, “How was it?”

Her gaze falls on him, tentative, choosing what she will tell him.

“All right,” she says. “Considering.”

A smile plays on her face. Away off, he can hear a siren from NYU Downtown pushing through lunchtime traffic.

“I knew it was cancer,” she says. “They told me that before I left. But that wasn’t why he died. It was everything else. Cigarettes and rum and heroin and cocaine. Like every poor fucked-up musician who ever lived. But it was women too. Always women.” A pause. A hesitant smile. “I went to the hospital, and the room looked like a beauty parlor. He was dying, all gray and shrunken up, and all the women came to say good-bye. Fat, skinny, young, old.” She chews a piece of maki. “If the cancer didn’t kill him, the perfume would’ve done the job. You’d have thought he was Warren Beatty.” She sips green tea and smiles. “I just slipped into the room, stood with my back to a wall. I counted three former wives. And yeah, four young guys came in and out, his sons by different women, but mostly it was women, all staring at him, with the tubes in his arms, and the Virgen de Altagracia above his head.”

She has told Cormac about this Virgen, the divine Madonna who intercedes for all Dominicans. Now she is moving into street rhythms, into that language that she dons like a shield. “But it’s not just the wives, who are whispering and praying and crying all around the room. It’s the whores too. They’re showing up from everywhere, and in comes a fat shiny mulata chick with four gold teeth and la Virgen tattooed over her left boob, and she’s bawling. The nurse—skinny, eyeglasses, white uniform—she goes, ‘You gotta leave, m’hija!’ and the mulata chick goes, ‘How can I leave? I’m the only one he ever loved!’

“The nurse busts out laughing. I mean, every fucking whore in Moca is in the room or out in the hall. And I can’t help myself, I start laughing too. My father’s dying, but, Jesus… The nurse grabs the end of the bed to hold herself up, she’s shaking with fucking laughter, and I grab the door frame, and we’re both pissing in our pants.”

She starts to laugh now, remembering.

“But the whore with the gold teeth looks at us like we’re totally insane. She goes, ‘What’s so funny, you hijas de putas? What’s so fucking funny?’ The sons look at each other, and so do the ex-wives, and I’m waiting for the knife to come out of the whore’s panties, and then she looks at my father, as if asking his permission to kill us, and now his eyes are open, and she screams: ’He’s alive! This motherfucker is alive!’ ”

She bends toward Cormac and grips his wrist.

“I mean, he was alive all along, but this crazy whore must’ve thought he was dead, because she spreads her legs and goes down on her knees and starts giving thanks to God. She’s got no panties on, so I was wrong about the knife, and now the four sons are looking at her box, which must terrify them—and she goes, ‘Oh, thank you, God, you are a great fucking man!’

“Now the nurse bounces back, screaming in laughter, and knocks me into the wall! I see my father’s eyes get wider, and now all the other whores are crowding in from the hall to see what all the hollering is about, and it’s like the six train at rush hour. Now a little security guard comes in, gray mustache, big wide eyes, wearing some kind of old UPS uniform—and he starts shouting, ‘Out, out! Everybody out!’ The fat whore with the gold teeth is still on the floor, surrounded by a wall of boobs and miniskirts, and she goes, ‘No, you get out, pendejo! This is a fucking miracle!’ ”

Cormac joins her in slamming the table and laughing. Delfina struggles now to breathe, then calms herself.

“And then he sees me.”

A pause. She daubs at her eyes with a napkin, wiping away the evidence of laughter.

“He sees me, and he stares at me, and for the first time all of them—the fat whore on the floor, the sons, the nurse, the whole team of other whores and the security guard—they all turn to look at me. Everybody shuts up.

“ ‘Delfina?’ my father says. It’s the first time since I got there that he said a word.

“I go, ‘Sí, Papi.’

“Tears come into his eyes. His fingers curl, long piano-player fingers, calling me to him. I go to his side and take his hand, which is very cold. I lean down close to his ear and say, ‘I love you, Papi.’

“His lips move—they’re blue in the light—but nothing comes out. I massage his hand with both of mine, trying to make his hand and fingers warm. I put my head next to his mouth. And then I hear the words. The words I came to Moca to hear.

“ ‘Lo siento,’ he says. I’m sorry.”

She chews at her lip and shrugs.

“Then he dies. He takes two more breaths and then nothing. He doesn’t look scared, or even relieved. He just stops.”

She stops now too for a moment. Her forefinger is curled in the tiny handle of a teacup. Wiggling it.

“The whores scream and wail. The fat whore tries to get up, to rush to my father, but she can’t do it, she’s too fat. She grabs the leg of a skinny whore like it’s a small tree and tries to pull herself up, but the skinny whore gives her a shove back on her knees. Two of the young men go over to help her, each grabbing a foot, so they can peer at the holy of holies, and they roll her over, so she can get some traction. They lift her like she’s a manatee they found on a beach. The security guard gives up and walks out, leaving the nurse to control the crowd, and I wish you were with me.”

Cormac touches her hand. She turns away, shaking her head slowly.

“The dumb son of a bitch.”

A muscle ripples bitterly in her jaw.

“Everybody loved him, but he couldn’t love anybody back. Not my mother. Not me. Not himself.”

She exhales, gestures with the cup.

“I gotta go back to my job.”

Cormac glances at the clock. She has ten minutes to walk to the Trade Center, and mumbles about calling later and picking a time to go to her place. He goes with her to the door. She looks at him.

“It was enough,” she says. “Lo siento… It wasn’t ‘I love you.’ It wasn’t even about me. It was about him, and how he felt. But what the hell.”

115.

That’s all there is to the great return. Hair, wetness, food, laughter. Most of all, laughter. And then departure. Staring at the door, Cormac notes that she never once mentioned Reynoso and uttered no words of regret, no request for forgiveness. Cormac smokes a cigarette and wraps the garbage and rinses the plates before stacking them in the dishwasher. He thinks that perhaps this is the style of her generation, common to all who grew pubic hair in the age of AIDS. Don’t risk true intimacy (so desired by Elizabeth Warren). Don’t delude yourself about love. Death could come at any time, and love would only add to the pain.

The computer might be part of it too, he thinks, allowing them to create little folders inside their brains. Each marked with an icon separate from all others, easy to call up or erase. Even if sometimes they cut and paste. After all, the high-speed printing press changed New Yorkers, adding urgency, fear, envy, even solidarity to their daily lives. It gave them Wordsworth and Homer and the Evening Graphic, Buffalo Bill and Moby-Dick and Jackie Robinson, gangsters and gun molls and the Death House at Sing Sing. Around 1840, New Yorkers started thinking in words on paper, visible or invisible, and acquired the habit of telling stories, and recycling them, and letting them marinate into myth. Human beings weren’t like that before the printing press and the penny paper. Cormac thinks: The computer must be making a similar alteration. Another grand mutation. With any luck, I will not live to see the results.

And yet, for all their differences, and in spite of her silences, he was charged with happiness when Delfina arrived, when he saw her smile, embraced her flesh, ran tip of tongue along the path of her spirals. Making love on a table was comical; but in most cases, in all places, no matter what the position, making love was always comical, in large ways or small. He was sure if she knew the truth about him she would dismiss him as another laughing Irishman with a splinter of ice in his heart.

And on some levels, she’d be right. Cormac hasn’t truly loved a woman in many years. He’s slept with plenty of women, and had deep affection for some of them. To be exact, nine of them, just like his number. But all of them died. That was the curse attached to the gift: You buried everyone you loved.

And after a while, around the middle of Prohibition, he could no longer feel that sense of deep connection, wordless need, and abundant ease that he thought was love. The armature of love seemed to have worn out. And now, astonishingly, it had returned with Delfina Cintron.

That was surely why he’d said nothing about Reynoso. He didn’t want to provoke words that he didn’t want to hear. He didn’t want to prosecute her for an offense he had committed himself. What he had done with Elizabeth was surely worse than what she had done with Reynoso, and after all, they had no contract, had made no vows to each other. He felt shame about Elizabeth; in her e-mail, Delfina expressed rage at her own weakness. That might be all two human beings can do, after the spasm called el muertito, the little death. The cliché is true (Cormac thinks), as clichés are usually true: The flesh is weak; each of us falls to its urgent tyranny. He hopes now that she took at least some small pleasure in the suite in Santo Domingo, was released for a minute or an hour from past and present, felt for ten seconds as one can feel after a sumptuous meal. In the end, what happened down there didn’t truly matter. Cormac thinks: I need this young woman. I want her. I love her.

Innocent, with an explanation.

They exchange e-mails. He tells her that on Sunday he celebrates his birthday. She replies that they must celebrate together, at her house. He agrees. She says they will dance. He says he will try.

The sense of imminence returns, a blurry feeling of the end of days. The cleaning woman arrives. Her name is Soledad, and she’s from Colombia, from the region of Macondo. She’s about fifty and lives in Queens and has been in New York for fourteen years. They talk in Spanish. Qué tal, señor? Muy bien, Soledad, y usted? She plays the Spanish station with the old boleros and sings along with them in a plaintive voice. While she vacuums and dusts, Cormac places five thousand dollars in an envelope for her. To be delivered later. He does not know what will happen in the coming days, but if he is truly leaving, he does not want to leave behind some dreadful mess. He would say one kind of farewell the way Bill Tweed did: to help someone else live.

Healey calls.

“Believe this? In ten minutes, I’m heading for the fucking HAMPTONS with this mark! In a limo! He asked me if I played TENNIS and I told him I had a bad back caused by the lack of FUCKING. He laughed, the runt, unable to listen to the truth. He says we can SPITBALL the script out there…. For the money he’s paying me, I could spitball KING LEAR!”

Cormac wishes him luck, urges upon him the slogan of Fiorello La Guardia—patience and fortitude—and asks him to call when he returns.

“We can spend some of this BLOOD money!” Healey says, and hangs up.

Forty minutes later, Elizabeth calls.

“Willie will see you on Monday night,” she says. “I told him you were bringing the thing to some expert, for cleaning, that you had some ideas for the newspaper. It’s all set. I’ll be in Boston, Patrick at some ball game, Willie awaits you. About seven-thirty.”

“I’ll be there,” Cormac says.

“You are a prick,” she says, and hangs up.

Cormac glances at the sword, wrapped in a towel. Soledad is upstairs in her own tight and noisy solitude. Cormac wanders to the bookcase and takes down a volume of Dürer drawings. There are the horsemen, the four of them, wielding a pitchfork, a measuring scale, a bow with arrow, and a sword. The man with the sword wears the pointed cap of the fool.

Cormac thinks: Have I seen my last snowfall? My last spring? And have I walked for the final time through a summer afternoon?